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19-03-21a03 The New York Review of Books PDF
19-03-21a03 The New York Review of Books PDF
COM/WSNWS
Amy Knight:
The Russian Crime of the Century
JAMES
McAULEY:
WHO ARE
THE YELLOW VESTS?
Kaiser Wilhelm
Jill Abramson
Oscar Wilde
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Allowed to Wherever the
Grow Old Sound Takes You
Portraits of Elderly Animals Heroics and Heartbreak in
from Farm Sanctuaries Music Making
Isa Leshko David Rowell
With a Foreword by Sy Montgomery and Essays by “A wide-ranging exploration of the hold
Gene Baur and Anne Wilkes Tucker
that music has on so many of us. . . .
“It is a pleasure to see these elderly cous- Every story concerns music, but the
ins of ours, rheumy-eyed, bewhiskered, heart of each are people.”—Kirkus Reviews
unsteady on their feet, enjoying their Cloth $22.50
twilight years in peace, security, and
dignity.”—J. M. Coetzee
Cloth $40.00
Aristotle’s Art of
Rhetoric
Pick Up the Pieces Translated and with an Interpretive Essay by
Robert C. Bartlett
Excursions in Seventies Music
“Bartlett’s singularly accurate, readable,
John Corbett and elegant translation of Aristotle’s
“Corbett is the Carl Sagan of vinyl. Art of Rhetoric renders accessible to
Funny and irreverent, he’s voyaged contemporary students and scholars this
across the stars and the human imagina- much-neglected foundational text of po-
tion to bring us music both ‘pathetic and litical philosophy.”—Peter Ahrensdorf,
sublime’ from that most misunderstood Davidson College
of decades, the 1970s.”—Rainn Wilson Cloth $40.00
Cloth $30.00
Georg Forster
Conspiracies of Voyager, Naturalist, Revolutionary
Conspiracies Jürgen Goldstein
How Delusions Have Overrun Translated by Anne Janusch
America “Goldstein explores Forster’s experience
Thomas Milan Konda of life and the ambivalent relationship
“The theories he weighs and finds between nature and philosophy. He
wanting are fascinating in their perver- shows Forster as more than a ship-
sity, from chemtrails to climate change wrecked hero, but rather as an insight-
deniers. A book that deserves wide circu- ful thinker who was as bold as he was
lation and consideration” stoic.”—Die Zeit
—Kirkus Reviews Cloth $45.00
Cloth $30.00
Battle in the
A Decent Life Mind Fields
Morality for the Rest of Us John A. Goldsmith and
Todd May Bernard Laks
“Particularly in its discussion of our “I don’t think there is any other work in
relations with political opponents, this the mind sciences that compares to the
book is a timely, illuminating, and depth and breadth of this one. Battle
inspiring work of moral philosophy.” in the Mind Fields is highly informa-
—Jeff McMahan, University of Oxford tive, rich, engaging, and a lot of fun to
Cloth $25.00 read.”—Ida Toivonen, Carleton
University
Cloth $45.00
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Contents
4 Clair Wills Milkman and two other books by Anna Burns
MEMBERS
8 Justin Quinn Poem
10 Sanford Schwartz John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum,
New York City, October 30, 2018–February 24, 2019
ONLY
Catalog of the exhibition by Diana Nawi with David Boxer, Olive Senior, and Nicole Smythe-Johnson
12 Fintan O’Toole Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics
by Chris Christie
Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House by Cliff Sims
16 Kathleen Ossip Poem
18 Michael Hofmann Never Look Away a film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
22 Jerome Groopman An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives
by Matt Richtel
The Beautiful Cure: The Revolution in Immunology and What It Means for Your Health
by Daniel M. Davis
26 Nathaniel Rich The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 by Zachary Leader
29 Ruth Bernard Yeazell Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement an exhibition at
the Vero Beach Museum of Art, February 9–May 5, 2019
Catalog of the exhibition by Martin Ellis, Victoria Osborne, and Tim Barringer
Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans
32 Wole Soyinka and ‘There’s One Humanity or There Isn’t’: A Conversation
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
35 Isabel V. Hull The Trial of the Kaiser by William A. Schabas
37 Jonathan Zimmerman Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side by Eve L. Ewing
A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s
by Elizabeth Todd-Breland
How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation’s
Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education by Arne Duncan
’63 Boycott a film by Gordon Quinn
40 Geoffrey Wheatcroft The Happy Prince a film by Rupert Everett
Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis M A R K W. M O F F E T T
42 Thomas Nagel Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals by Christine M. Korsgaard
44 Paul Starr Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics THE HUMAN
by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts
49
51
Robert Irwin Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain by Brian A. Catlos
Amy Knight The February 2015 Assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Flawed Trial of His Alleged Killers:
SWARM
An Exploration of Russia’s “Crime of the 21st Century” by John B. Dunlop How Our Societies Arise,
Nemtsov a documentary film by Vladimir V. Kara-Murza
The Man Who Was Too Free a documentary film by Vera Krichevskaya Thrive, and Fall
54 Claire Messud Lost Children Archive and four other books by Valeria Luiselli
58 James McAuley Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France by Christophe Guilluy
62 253 Signatories An Open Letter to Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk
62 Letters from Erica Jong and Elaine Blair
“This highly readable
book is ambitious in its
CONTRIBUTORS interdisciplinary breadth,
JEROME GROOPMAN is the Recanati Professor of Medicine at JUSTIN QUINN’s most recent collection of poetry is Early House. He
Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at the Beth teaches at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic. rigorous in its science, and
Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. NATHANIEL RICH’s latest novel is King Zeno. His next book, Losing
He is the coauthor, with Pamela Hartzband, of Your Medical Mind: Earth: A Recent History, will be published in April. deeply thought-provoking
How to Decide What Is Right for You.
SANFORD SCHWARTZ is the author of Christen Købke and William in its implications.”
MICHAEL HOFMANN is a poet and translator from the German. Nicholson.
His latest translation is of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, and
his new book of poems, One Lark, One Horse, will be published in the
WOLE SOYINKA is a Nigerian poet, playwright, novelist, and essay-
ist. He received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature. HENRY LOUIS
—R O B E R T S A P O L S K Y ,
US in July. He teaches at the University of Florida. GATES JR. is the Alfonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor and Direc- A U T H O R O F B E H AV E
ISABEL V. HULL recently retired as the John Stambaugh Professor tor of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
of History at Cornell. Her books include The Entourage of Kaiser Wil- at Harvard. His book Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Suprem-
helm II, 1888–1918 and, most recently, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and acy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and his PBS documentary series Recon-
Making International Law During the Great War. struction: America After the Civil War will both be released in April.
ROBERT IRWIN is the Middle East Editor of the Times Literary PAUL STARR is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Prince- “A wide-ranging, deeply
ton and author of The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Mod-
Supplement. His recent books include Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Bi-
ern Communications. His next book, Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, interesting analysis of how
ography and Wonders Will Never Cease, a novel.
and the Constitution of Democratic Societies, will be published in May. large numbers of individual
AMY KNIGHT is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Her most recent GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT’s books include The Controversy
book is Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder. of Zion, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair! His new agents become a society....
JAMES McAULEY is the Paris correspondent for The Washington Post. book, Churchill’s Bust, will be published next year.
CLAIRE MESSUD’s latest novel is The Burning Girl. CLAIR WILLS is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature There is no other book I’ve
at Cambridge. Her latest book, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant
THOMAS NAGEL is University Professor Emeritus at NYU. He is the History of Post-War Britain, was shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize. read recently that made
author of The View From Nowhere, Mortal Questions, and Mind and
Cosmos, among other books. RUTH BERNARD YEAZELL is Sterling Professor of English at my neurons pop at the
Yale. Her books include Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paint-
KATHLEEN OSSIP’s latest book of poems is The Do-Over. She
teaches at the New School.
ings Acquired Their Names and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting rate this book did.”
and the Realist Novel.
FINTAN O’TOOLE is a columnist with The Irish Times and the Leon- JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN is Professor of History of Education at —M A H Z A RIN B A N A JI,
ard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. The Poli- the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The Case for
tics of Pain: Postwar England and the Road to Brexit will be published Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools, with A U T H O R O F B LI N D S P OT
in the US in the fall. Emily Robertson.
3
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Magnum Photos
“middle sister”) recalls watch- ing preoccupation— obsession
ing Rear Window for the first with exercise, obsession with
time. Most of the novel sticks cars and hoarding car-parts,
to events that occurred when obsession with the threat of
middle sister was eighteen, as nuclear war, obsession with
she takes us back to sometime churchgoing. “In those days
in the late 1970s, in some part then, impossible it was not to
of Republican-area Belfast. be closed-up because closed-
But her encounter with Rear upness was everywhere.”
Window comes from slightly What hope for an affectionate
earlier, when she was about dog in such a place?
twelve: The problem of perspective
has long been a challenge for
A little dog gets killed, writing about the Troubles.
strangled, neck broken, Do you stick with a first-
which is not the message person narrative, risking the
of the film but for me was danger of remaining caught
the message of the film be- within one of the two warring
cause its owner— bereft, sides? Do you try narrative
in shock—wails out her switching (say, between Prot-
window over all the apart- estant and Catholic friends,
ment building, “Which one as Robert McLiam Wilson
of you did it? . . . couldn’t does in his 1996 novel Eureka
imagine . . . so low you’d kill Street)? Do you construct an
a little helpless friendly . . . ambitious, multi-perspectival,
only thing in this whole truth-and-reconciliation-type
neighbourhood who liked Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1965; photograph by Philip Jones Griffiths panorama, as in Owen Mc-
anybody. Did you kill him Cafferty’s post- ceasefire play
because he liked you, just because she goes running with “third brother-in- Marys by definition are not identifiable Scenes from the Big Picture (2003)? Or
he liked you?” law”; she talks to “longest friend” and as individuals. In effect, proper names, do you rely on the outsider?
reads bedtime stories to “wee sisters.” and even the first person singular, have It is not at all surprising that crime
And twelve-year- old middle sister These general appellations are markers lost their function in middle sister’s fiction and thrillers have flourished in
knows that is indeed exactly why it of safety in a community where the last world because ordinary civilian life, the North in recent years. In a murky
happened. The need of a whole neigh- thing anyone wants is to be singled out. insofar as it is achievable at all, is a life atmosphere distorted by intercom-
borhood to murder affection— even a The closer anyone gets to a proper name in hiding— at its most extreme, a life munal violence and political corrup-
dog’s affection— makes perfect sense the more dangerous it is, even if it’s only without a self. tion, the exercise of moral authority
to her. It is self- defense. She lives “in a nickname: “nuclear boy,” who has and truth-telling, or at least truth-
a statelet immersed long-term on the killed himself because of his obsession discovering, must be handed to the
physical and energetic planes in the with impending nuclear war (clearly a And that is middle sister’s problem— nonaligned detective, the forensic sci-
dark mental energies; conditioned too, victim of “Americo-Russo atomic bomb she needs a strategy for how to be, but entist, or the journalist. These figures
through years of personal and commu- displacement condition,” given the war to remain invisible, and for how to can cross borders, such as the peace
nal suffering, personal and communal on his doorstep); “the man who didn’t find her way around in the dark, but walls built to separate the two com-
history, to be overladen with heaviness love anybody,” also known as “real without seeing. The strategy she has munities on sectarian lines, and so map
and grief and fear and anger.” In this milkman,” who takes a stand against hit on is “reading while walking.” As the city and its surroundings for the
environment, unforced affection (and the local paramilitaries, also known as you can tell from her weary encoun- reader. Anna Burns gives us no such
charity, hope, and love) is out of place, “renouncers- of-the-state”; the “women ter with McSomebody, middle sister is guide to help us through the murk. She
and therefore threatening. The only with issues” (i.e., feminists). smart— a joyfully funny and intelligent has written a novel in which knowledge
one of the biblical virtues to stand its Best of all the nicknames is “Some- guide to her own community and her is too dangerous to risk, and therefore
ground is faith, and it does so grimly. body McSomebody,” who likes to entrapment inside it. She is addicted the idea of a future to which knowledge
Even light struggles, so that the lack of pretend he is Somebody in the para- to eighteenth- and nineteenth- century might lead us, or any straightforward
trust among people is answered by a militaries. Up until the time he assaults fiction— so addicted that she reads idea of a plot— all the usual building
physical pall: middle sister in the ladies’ restroom of as she walks to and from work, to her blocks of fiction—won’t do.
the local club, McSomebody provides French class, to her dates with maybe- The book that kept coming to mind
It was as if the electric lights were opportunities for Burns to skewer the boyfriend. Initially she appears to be while I was reading Milkman was
turned off, always turned off, even character of the bullying male bore, that familiar, if old-fashioned, figure Seamus Deane’s powerful 1996 novel,
though dusk was over so they should desperate to impress. First he tries out of the middle- class girl teen trying out Reading in the Dark, which was short-
have been turned on yet nobody “stalk-talk,” which is mostly violent, her identification with Elinor, Mari- listed for the Booker Prize. Deane’s
was turning them on and nobody and requires referring to himself in the anne, Dorothea, Natasha, Elizabeth, narrator (also unnamed) is, like middle
noticed either, they weren’t on. All first person plural. (“You started this. or Jane. Her obsession with novels of- sister, a teenage reader in a large fam-
this too, seemed normality which You made us look at you. . . . You don’t fers the reader a welcome respite from ily that has obscure ties to the Republi-
meant then, that part of normality know what we’re capable of and when the disorientations of her everyday life. can movement. Let us call him middle
here was this constant, unacknowl- you least expect it . . . you’ll pay back Books exist, ordinarily, in a world of brother. Middle brother is growing up
edged struggle to see. for . . .”) And then he has a go at hard- proper names, and these names from in Derry and, like middle sister, he is
man bravado. It doesn’t work: the world of fiction seem to promise us persecuted by a half-understood his-
The struggle to see, and to make a purchase in middle sister’s world. We tory of violence and intimidation. His
sense of what is seen, lies at the heart of “We can have an off day,” he said, encounter not only Rear Window but response is to become an investigator of
Milkman, and it is a struggle we get to “with that off day spelling our last also The Brothers Karamazov, Tris- his own family’s secrets, and although
L E O D A M R O S C H , The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age “Damrosch [provides] crisp, colorful
\DOH
portraits of its members, illuminated by quotes from their lively, sometimes contentious interactions with each other. . . .
This effervescent history shines a light on the extraordinary origins of a club which still exists to this day.”—Publishers
Weekly, starred review Q “Late-18th-century Britain comes brilliantly alive in a vibrant intellectual history.”—Kirkus
Reviews, starred review
S U S A N C R A W F O R D , Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It “A timely and urgent look at
how America is sacrificing its digital future, productivity, connectivity, social mobility, entrepreneurial growth, education,
and every other public good, thanks to rapacious telcos, scumbag lobbyists, and negligent, cash-hungry politicians. . . .
You should be reading this.”—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
C H R I S T O P H E G U I L L U Y , Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, T R A N S L AT E D F R O M
THE FRENCH BY M ALCOL M DEBEVOISE “An indispensable guide to understanding the fears and frustrations of an
increasingly permanent underclass—not just in France, but throughout the world. . . . Disturbing and affecting . . . [Guilluy]
has hit on something profound that extends well beyond the borders of France.”—Jonathan A. Knee, New York Times
S H I N G - T U N G YA U A N D S T E V E N A D I S , The Shape of a Life: One Mathematician’s Search for the Universe’s Hidden
UHDGV
Geometry “The remarkable story of one of the world’s most accomplished mathematicians, Shing-Tung Yau, who has
made profound contributions in pure mathematics, general relativity, and string theory. Yau’s personal journey. . . inspires
us all with humankind’s irrepressible spirit of discovery.”—Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe
A D I N A H O F F M A N , Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures“This book makes you wish you’d known the guy,
if only to watch the sparks he threw off.”—John Sayles Q “[A] precise and lively portrait . . . Each phase in Hecht’s
adventures is electrifying . . . Hoffman’s concentrated biography is smartly entertaining and revelatory.”—Booklist, starred
review Q Jewish Lives
S T E P H A N I E E . J O N E S - R O G E R S , They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
“A deeply researched and powerfully argued book that completely overturns romanticized notions of the plantation
mistresses and resistant southern white women.”—Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of
Abolition Q “Nothing less than phenomenal. . . . This is a must read.”—Tera W. Hunter, Professor of African-American
Studies, Princeton University
yalebooks.com
he learns that the truth most definitely something. Since the real is so hard by turning herself into a blank, “an individuals, when people are given to
does not set you free, the novel’s plot to name, we continually teeter on the inert, vapid person,” another missing talking in the first person plural.
is constructed around that search for edge of the surreal. Take middle sister’s bit of the landscape. Her predicament, Yet as she keeps reminding us with lit-
truth. Burns’s genius lies in entirely mother, for example— a truly superb that of victims of abuse and violence tle interjections—“not yet,” “not here,”
renouncing the classic truth- discovery depiction of a harried woman trying everywhere, is that she begins to lose “not then”—grown-up middle sister
plot. Detective work— even at its most to maintain control in an environment the sense of self she has been trying to writes from a post-therapy world. By
Miss Marple, most feminine and unas- that is beyond control. Hearing the ru- protect by retreating from the world. In switching back and forth between some-
suming—is completely unavailable to mors about middle sister and Milkman, the face of other people’s distrust and thing resembling an eighteenth-century
middle sister. ma objects not to the murderer bit, and the “push-pull” of suspicion, she finds language of fiction (not yet fixed into
The first reason for this is that while not even to the middle-aged bit, but herself unraveling: “Thus my feelings standard grammar) and a twenty-first
Deane’s novel was set in the late 1950s to the married bit. She lectures her stopped expressing. Then they stopped century therapeutic language of self-
and 1960s, ending with the deployment daughter on the Sixth Commandment: existing. . . . I, too, came to find me inac- expression, she seems to be asking us to
of British troops in 1969, Burns sets her cessible.” Burns writes with fearful in- consider the question: What could be
novel a decade later, amid a wholesale If I really felt I had to cleave to a tensity of the insidious effects of male the appropriate vocabulary for feeling
breakdown of civil society. It is not sim- renouncer, could I not officially abuse of power and control, as middle in the face of such violence? But actu-
ply that the population of Northern Ire- have gotten myself married to him? sister is rendered helpless, unable to ex- ally her take on language is more radi-
land is divided into us and them, “our That way I’d be accepted. “Though plain what is happening to her, and— cal than that. Without an appropriate
side of the road” and “their side of the goodness knows,” she said, language in which to express
Charlie Forgham-Bailey/eyevine/Redux
road,” but that the entire urban land- “being the wife can’t be easy their feelings, her characters
scape has been eroded by violence and in itself. All those prison can’t really feel. Emotions such
the threat of violence, whether directed visits. The tombstone visits. as shame or sorrow (or fear,
against loyalist paramilitaries, against The being spied upon by the pity, and compassion) have to
the state, or internally in feuds among enemy police, by the soldiers, wait until there are words for
armed Republicans. There is no way of by fellow renouncer-wives and them. Like Eliot, Burns’s peo-
mapping this city, as Burns shows bril- renouncer-comrades of the ple have “had the experience
liantly by naming the space between husband. Indeed the whole but missed the meaning.”
her neighborhood and the city center community would be at it,”
“the ten-minute area.” A significant she said. “Making sure of her
scene in the novel takes place in the fidelity.” ilkman is Burns’s third M
ten-minute area, but it is nonetheless a novel, and in all of them she
blank, a missing part of the landscape, Most of ma’s homilies go on takes a backward look into the
given shape only by the time it takes to for pages, and the joy of them past of the Troubles. In No
cross it. is the number of arguments Bones (2001), her first book,
she can come up with without she is explicit about it, dating
naming anything directly (“the her series of linked short sto-
But the primary reason for middle tombstone visits”). Later she ries to a succession of historical
sister’s powerlessness is that she is a hears a rumor that middle sister moments. We begin on “Thurs-
girl. Burns insists on the intimate re- is pregnant: day, 1969,” when Amelia is in
lationship between political violence primary school and violence
and sexual violence, one nourishing “In the name of God!” she erupts. She gets through the
and feeding off the other. A neighbor- cried. “Are they correct? Is August riots, when Catholics
hood under paramilitary control is one everybody correct? Have you were burned out of their homes,
in which women are “befouled” despite been fecundated by him, by by hiding under the table and
their best efforts to protect themselves. that renouncer, that ‘top of playing a game with her sister
The stalker’s victim has no comeback. wanted list’ clever man, the of guessing “what’s been blown
It is a case of “what females could say false milkman?” “What?” up.” We end with “A Peace Pro-
and what they could never say,” what I said, for it had been singu- cess, 1994,” when Amelia and
they could do and what they could lar, that word she’d used and her surviving school-friends
never do. genuinely for a moment I had try a disastrous, and hilarious,
Middle sister’s troubles start when not a clue what she meant day out to Rathlin Island. They
she is noticed by Milkman— a proper by it. “Imbued by him?” she Anna Burns, London, October 2018 are all reformed alcoholics and
name that is not a proper name, in that elaborated. “Engendered in. they have all been mutilated by
it’s not so much a nickname as an un- Breeded in. Fertilised, vexed, even if she could explain— unable to the Troubles, bearing everything from
derstatement of the power this local embarrassed, sprinkled, caused get anyone to listen. kneecapping wounds to the more invis-
paramilitary wields in the community. to feel regret, wished not to have The novel is carried by the extraor- ible scars from long incarceration in
Milkman starts tailing middle sister as happened— dear God, child, do I dinary dynamism of middle sister’s prisons and psychiatric wards.
she walks and runs around her neigh- have to spell it out?”. . . Next came voice, full of syntactically vertiginous No Bones is a struggle to read, not
borhood while reading, and almost abortions and I had to guess them constructions and new coinages such because it is not well written, but be-
immediately rumors begin to circulate also, from “vermifuge, pennyroyal, as “numbance” (for what happens to cause it insists that we look in detail
that she is in a relationship with this Satan’s apple, premature expul- you when you are threatened sexually) at the violent horrors of the years be-
man, who is middle-aged, and mar- sion, being failed in the course of or “earbashings” (of McSomebody’s tween 1969 and 1994. Everything—
ried, and a murderer. She quickly finds coming into being” with any doubt verbal onslaughts). But all this verbal from sixteen-year- old Rab McCormick
herself under surveillance not only by dispelled by, “Well, daughter, you energy is a consequence of living in a killing himself in a game of Russian
Milkman, who is a far more frightening can’t disappoint me any more than time and a place that lacks a language roulette because he wanted to “mat-
and effective stalker than Somebody you’ve already disappointed me, so of feeling. The word “sorry,” for exam- ter,” to thirteen-year- old Mary Dolan
McSomebody, but also by the state tell me—what did you procure and ple, “nobody yet knew here how to say.” wheeling her rotting, premature dead
(cameras click behind bushes as she which of them drab aunts did you Ditto “shame”: “I didn’t know shame. baby (the result of her father’s atten-
passes), and by her entire community. procure it of?” I mean as a word, because as a word, tions) in a toy pram, to Amelia’s eat-
And she is powerless to do anything it hadn’t yet entered the communal vo- ing disorder, her rape, and many many
about it. She is trapped in indirection. What’s exhilarating about reading ma cabulary. Certainly I knew the feeling murders and attempted murders—is
Not only is there nobody to tell, but is that, although we know she would not of shame and I knew everyone around recounted in the same deadpan ever-
“there was still my lack of certainty as use words such as “vermifuge,” by heap- me knew that feeling as well.” Burns so-slightly-ironic tone. The barrier be-
to whether or not there was anything to ing “vermifuge” on top of “do I have writes of the 1970s as a time before psy- tween fiction and history is so thin in
tell. That was the way it worked. . . . It to spell it out?,” Burns gets us right on chology, before even the idea of emo- No Bones that the book feels danger-
was constant hints, symbolisms, repre- board with the shock and disapproval, tional damage or psychological trauma. ous for the reader. I returned to it after
sentations, metaphors.” even while we are laughing. Its very im- Almost, she implies, a time before peo- each break in reading with reluctance,
These constant hints and symbolisms plausibility gives us a breathless sense ple were prepared to count the human but not to read on was worse, because it
are one source of the novel’s macabre of her desperation. Ma is a three-way cost of violence. That is, there is a good meant ignoring the fates of Amelia and
comedy. There were times reading spirit: a caricature (anyone’s Northern deal of counting in the novel, as num- her friends, in the way they had been
Milkman when I thought I would get Irish Catholic ma), an explosion of lan- bers of girlfriends, guns, body parts, ignored as children.
a cramp from laughing, but it is hard guage, and a woman utterly herself. and dead sons are tallied up. Middle And the novel is not without a sense
to do justice to the book’s humor in a Because of the amount of energy sister’s neighborhood is addicted to of hope. It is not, as it is not in Milk-
review because much of it comes from expended in avoiding naming things, bizarre reckonings (can ma date again man, that any of this horror can be re-
the sheer length of characters’ speeches middle sister’s world is an exhausting if she’s had “only one son dead and a deemed. Burns does not believe that
and of grown-up middle sister’s own place to live. Increasingly cornered husband, no daughters”?), but it is a awful experiences make you stronger;
free-wheeling, digressive, retrospective by the sinister Milkman, and increas- form of accounting that makes people nor does she have any time for a reli-
narration. Everybody is continually ingly the subject of gossip, she tries to substitutable for one another. After gious view of suffering. But in all three
searching for another way of saying deflect the community’s interest in her all, Burns implies, this is a time before of her novels, she does suggest that
“A WHITE-KNUCKLE THRILLER”
“NAIL-BITING”
DISTURBING VIOLENCE
THROUGHOUT, BLOODY
IMAGES, AND LANGUAGE
@HotelMumbaiFilm HotelMumbaiFilm.com
what lies in the future for the trapped availed of. In Little Constructions the familiar Sunday supplement style, Window– style, on maybe-boyfriend
victims of the Troubles is a way of (2007), Burns’s second novel, therapy- and asks us to sit up. Nonetheless, the and his friend Chef. There is some-
thinking about feeling. Like the truth, speak is one of the tools of the chatty tone is so utterly out of place in the un- thing disturbing about the voyeurism
the language of psychology does not set narrator, as she keeps trying to get the folding tale of murder, torture, mutila- of this tender scene between two young
you free, but it may give you resources. reader on her side. “If we’re going to tion, and rape (“I use the term ‘rape’ men. But middle sister does not judge,
Two thirds of the way through No be mentally healthy, you and me, and loosely because, technically, he didn’t and she does not intervene. She simply
Bones, Amelia moves to London. It have days of authenticity going on be- rape her. Someone else had raped her. reads the scene in front of her, and de-
is the late 1980s, and after a couple of tween us, you’ll need to know . . . ,” for But he did physically beat her after cides that maybe maybe-boyfriend’s
years she has a breakdown. The break- example. Or, speaking of the matter of dragging her on to the wasteground. name should change, to ex-maybe-
down itself is described exquisitely. advice-giving: This put her very much into that old boyfriend. The generosity of her in-
She is in a shop in Camden Town and memory of invasion and annihilation”) terpretation contrasts sharply with the
cannot decide between buying tins of The great thing since the discovery that we are forced to ask, what kind of power dynamics at play in the novel’s
baked beans or a family-size box of of Recovery is not to be seen to be tone would be in place? The question scenes of male surveillance. Middle
Special K. Back and forth between the giving it. It’s no longer appropriate is not just how can pain like this be ex- sister’s reading is about understanding
shelves she goes, frozen in panic, and to interrupt people while they’re pressed, but how can healthy talk about relationships between people at ground
all the time eyed by a security guard listing their problems and say, rape keep you safe from harm? level, rather than drinking in the view
“who hadn’t been trained in break- “You should” or “If I were you,” Milkman dispenses with the history from the top of the mountain.
downs, particularly on how to notice or “If I was you.” Apparently if and geography that anchor us in No In the end, the message of hope the
the little things that triggered the big- you do this, you show yourself up Bones and with the knowing narrator novel offers lies in the fact that middle
ger things off.” She becomes paralyzed as ignorant, anxious, controlling of Little Constructions. Instead our sister survives, and survives with her
on the street outside, unable to tell and old-fashioned. Only in the old guide to the insidious violence inflicted inventiveness and generosity intact.
whether she is in London or back in days did people behave like that. on a young woman who likes reading Recovery means being able to tell the
Belfast surrounded by the dead of her However, none of us likes to be old books is an older version of her- story in all its varied vocabularies, so it
childhood; she holds on to the metal told we can’t interfere and organ- self, who is well versed in what passes depends, quite literally, on reading. But
grill fitted against the shop window to ise another person’s life for them, for today’s language of feeling. It is it also depends, explicitly for Burns, on
keep herself from falling. I have gone no matter how evolved into psy- like triangulation—we get to pinpoint being able to write from the other side
back to that chapter several times, and chological modernity we are. Even more precisely, but not because any of violence. All three of her novels are
each time I have found myself weeping. whilst standing back with our calm one perspective is more valuable than written from a post- ceasefire perspec-
Amelia eventually enters treatment, bodies and our meditative breaths. another. And in the end it may not be tive; her narrators have been saved, in
and No Bones plots the growth of the point of view that counts so much as part, by the Good Friday Agreement. It
language of psychology alongside the It is true that the narrator’s odd attitude. Toward the end of the novel, is impossible to read Milkman without
development of the peace process— grammatical interest in whether one middle sister herself gets to try out a a sense of incredulity that anyone might
that language ironized as much as would say “was” or “were” cuts across bit of Milkmanish surveillance, Rear be thinking of endangering that.
WAGON-LIT NIŽBOR
1. 5.
When we were stopped in Lviv, we needed air In the Exclusion Zone, with curious ease
and pulled the window down a bit. we sailed across wild meadows in the streets,
A blade of bitter cold slid in; with it past concrete plains arrayed with fallen struts,
a voice, an old man’s voice: “The children here . . .” their structures open to the lightest breeze.
He paused to catch his breath a moment, “They . . .” We’d heard that some came back in the belief
But we were off. For hours then all we saw that they’d be better off where it occurred
were fields and fields of luminescent snow. —the authorities, it seemed, no longer cared—
And we heard nothing further till the day. like shadows moving through an afterlife.
2. 6.
From Ústí up to Dresden, in the night, The populations moving, heavily laden.
what seemed like crowds moved up and down the train, In Kiev and in Warsaw we saw scores
their shuffling syncopated with the din of people, even children, on the squares
the wheels made on the rails. From left to right strewn in the way that sheaves in storms lie down.
the carriages tilted into every slope A sigh gone from each body, they subsided,
along the Elbe’s twisting corridor. gradually nudged and shifted by the stems
Once someone tried the handle of our door, of different weeds, and by the ravening teams
thought better of it and we went back to sleep. of ants and maggots, till their flesh and blood dried out.
3. 7.
Toward evening, the train came to a sudden stop We pulled the bunks down, spread the sheets across
outside a village called Lesnoye. Silence. and passed the bottle back and forth until
Nothing stirring in the wooded highlands. the rails rocked us to sleep. We were moving still
The houses and the buildings of the co-op when sunlight broke over a field of grass,
stockstill—or rather they warped and rusted and tore a wrecking yard, or stretch of silver lake;
at speeds so low their change escaped the eye. and moving still at speed through smaller towns,
Then we were off—the forest slipping by, the village stations done in creams and browns,
the dwellings moving normally once more. the red-capped station master’s drowsy look.
4. 8.
There was the time a child joined us a while. We stopped at one called Nižbor toward the evening.
Perhaps he’d lost his parents on the road. A child spoke to us in the local language.
Someone had lifted him out of the crowd We gave her sweets. The grass rose to the linkage.
at Košice main station not a mile Nearby, at a bar, people were leaving,
behind (we’d seen most of those goings-on, loud songs and loud good-byes. When they were gone,
on the platform hundreds trying to board, silence but for a dog’s untroubled bark.
but just in time the carriage doors were barred). The railway tracks stretched off into the dark.
We dozed a little. When we woke he was gone. The lights clicked through their signals till the dawn.
—Justin Quinn
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INVENTION
AND DESIGN
EARLY ITALIAN DRAWINGS
AT THE MORGAN
THROUGH MAY 19
Invention and Design: Early Italian Drawings at the Morgan is made possible with generous support from Madison Ave. at 36th St.
the Scholz Family Charitable Trust, the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust,
the Alex Gordon Fund for Exhibitions, and the Andrew W. Mellon Research and Publications Fund. themorgan.org
#MorganLibrary
Giovanni Agostino da Lodi (active ca. 1467–ca. 1524), Head of a Bearded Man in Profile to the Right, ca. 1500, red chalk on paper.
The Morgan Library & Museum, 1973.35:1, Gift of János Scholz. Photography by Janny Chiu, 2018.
really does believe that the genetic in- sible?” Yet he then compares himself to to retain the same beliefs from And the pleasure in this is that his
heritance of extraordinary instincts is the persecuted Christians of Egypt and birth to death. It didn’t tell you followers, like Communists of old des-
what has made so him uniquely quali- likens his own loyalty to Trump to the to believe one thing on Monday perately tacking to the shifting winds
fied to intuit the truth about any subject agonizing compromises they have to and another on Tuesday. . . . In a of the Moscow line, must agree that
on earth. In October 2018 he told the make with their dictatorial president, sense, [the believer’s] thoughts are Trump’s opposites are equally right. If
Associated Press that he understood Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Such moral eva- circumscribed, but he passes his and when Trump decides that the Chi-
climate change because “my uncle was sions, he seems to acknowledge, were whole life within the same frame- nese are not, as he called them at a rally
a great professor at MIT for many years. “the things I needed to tell myself in work of thought. His emotions in 2011, “motherfuckers” but the great-
Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to order to keep going on this campaign.” aren’t tampered with. Now, with est allies the US has ever had, that is
him about this particular subject, but I They were also the things those who totalitarianism exactly the oppo- what they will be.
have a natural instinct for science.” worked for Trump would keep telling site is true. The peculiarity of the In international relations, predict-
themselves in the White House: that totalitarian state is that though it ability is founded on the principle that
Trump’s uniqueness places him above controls thought, it doesn’t fix it. It treaty obligations assumed under one
This belief in Trump’s own version of ordinary morality. sets up unquestionable dogmas . . . regime will not be discarded by its
predestination is the fundamental basis because it needs absolute obedi- successor. Trump has overturned this
for his presidency. Sims writes that ence from its subjects, but it can’t principle by withdrawing or threaten-
Trump “operated almost entirely off T he gut is a tyrant. Intuition is both avoid the changes, which are dic- ing to withdraw from the Paris climate
of gut instinct” and hence that “no one inherently unpredictable and, as a basis tated by the needs of power poli- accord, the Trans-Pacific Partner-
knew what he would say, not even the for public policy, inherently ship, UNESCO, the multi-
staff.” He notes his “general lack of in- anti- democratic. It does not Donald Trump lateral nuclear accord with
terest in the minutiae of . . . pretty much have to account for itself— Iran, NAFTA, the Univer-
everything”—instinct does not require any more than divine inspi- sal Postal Agreement, the
evidence. Peter Navarro, whom Trump ration can be questioned by Intermediate-Range Nuclear
brought into the White House in 2017 believers. It is not open to Forces Treaty, the Korean–
as his adviser on trade policy, told Bob contradiction because it is United States Free Trade
Woodward that the president’s intu- entirely personal—the in- Agreement, and the World
ition on trade is “always right” and that sight is unique to the presi- Trade Organization. All in-
the job of the people around him is thus dent. Trump declared in his ternational treaties are, to
to “provide the underlying analytics acceptance speech at the Trump, the equivalents of
that confirm his intuition.” Sims uses Republican convention in Christie’s doomed transi-
a very similar phrase, writing of how 2016, having evoked an tion plan, threats to his mo-
Trump’s chief courtiers “built the intel- apocalyptic vision of a bro- nopoly on unpredictability.
lectual framework that turned Trump’s ken America, “I alone can fix Sims records a conversation
raw, gut instincts into actual policy po- it.” This “I” is all gut and no in the Oval Office in which
sitions.” He admits that he himself fed brain. Everything in govern- the president boasted to him
Trump newspaper articles “for one rea- ment must flow from the in- of having made the US even
son only: to tell him he had been right stincts of the singular leader. more unpredictable than
about something. . . . I’d print it out, Trump was being entirely North Korea: “Now they
write a little note on it that said, ‘You consistent when he spoke of don’t know what to make
were right about this.’” Instinct first, his admiration for the way of me. . . . They don’t have
supporting evidence later. North Korean dictator Kim any idea. No one does. And
This is as clear a statement as one Jong-un exerted authority: that’s a good thing. That’s
could want of the nature of the admin- “He speaks and his people how it should be.”
istration, especially as Trump has re- sit up at attention. I want my
shaped it over time by ditching those people to do the same.” If,
who did not understand that their job, as he later claimed, this was The problem for Trump’s
first and last, was to confirm the in- a joke, it was nonetheless a enablers is not just that his
stincts of the infallible leader. They highly revelatory jest. tics. It declares itself infallible, and intuitions are innately unpredictable
must practice a sycophancy that is not It does not matter that Trump’s at the same time it attacks the very and that this reduces the governing pro-
just political but biological. When his oracular speech is hardly delphic. As concept of objective truth. 3 cess, in Sims’s description, to holding
physician (and failed nominee as secre- Sims puts it, “Trump talked like other “the thin line between controlled chaos
tary for veterans’ affairs) Ronny Jack- people breathed. It was like a form of This is very Trumpian. He replaces and total anarchy.” It is that Trump’s
son announced after Trump’s physical exercise for him— an endless exertion objective truth with subjective truth real political instincts are not for gov-
examination in 2018 that “he has in- of words, phrases, asides, and observa- but insists that his followers recognize erning but for campaigning. In this, he
credibly good genes, and it’s just the tions. Sometimes he’d start a sentence it nonetheless as objectively infallible. is surely the first president for whom
way God made him,” he was not merely and figure out the point he wanted to While his core political program has the office itself is a let-down, the rather
engaging in pseudomedical hyperbole. make along the way.” Yet this logor- now reduced itself to a single item— dreary destination after a thrilling jour-
He was reciting the first article of faith rhea is—for himself and his acolytes— build that wall— everything else can ney. As Sims astutely notes, “nothing
in the Trump apostle’s creed: Trump is the expression of infallible instincts. change. The admiring Sims writes that about being President has ever reached
genetically superior, and this superior- The spontaneous overflow of Trump’s Trump has “strong opinions, weakly the high of becoming President.” But
ity manifests itself in his intuitions. momentary emotions is the sole source held.” And this opens the way to the the one high he can still reach is the
It does not seem incidental that this of America’s salvation. The job of his most pleasing performance of power. buzz of one-way loyalty.
is one of the reasons why religious con- underlings is not— as Christie among One great mark of power is that, to In The Art of the Deal, Trump makes
servatives are so comfortable serving others mistakenly thought—to hold your followers, you are equally infalli- it clear that by far the highest human
Trump: sinner though he may be, he is them back or to organize them, but ble when you proclaim opposite truths. value is personal loyalty. Beyond his
a source of revealed truth. It is strik- to channel them. Confirmation bias Thus, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz had his sins own family, the one individual for
ing that in both Christie’s and Sims’s in this administration is not an epis- washed clean in October 2018 when whom he seems to feel something like
accounts, the emergence of the Ac- temological failing. It is the primary Trump rebaptized him “Beautiful Ted.” love is his mentor, the notorious Roy
cess Hollywood tape of Trump boast- principle of governance: first, confirm (The new nickname has not stuck.) Or, Cohn. He acknowledges that, as his
ing about sexually assaulting women Trump’s biases. in a matter of rather more moment, lawyer, Cohn could be brilliant but
is seen as the testing ground for true Since he alone can access his infalli- Kim Jong-un can be transformed from “could also be a disaster.” He even ad-
loyalty. Both men make much of their ble gut, and since instincts are immune the Little Rocket Man on whom Trump mits, in essence, that Cohn was a crook
religious faith, Catholic in Christie’s to consistency, Trump’s subordinates would unleash “fire and fury like the who “once told me that he’d spent more
case, evangelical in Sims’s, and of their must accommodate themselves to his world has never seen” to “Chairman than two thirds of his adult life under
happy marriages. Here, Trump’s true unpredictability. In a wartime broad- Kim” with whom, in his own words, he indictment on one charge or another.”
“instincts” were fully audible—feral, cast for the BBC, George Orwell re- “fell in love.” The Trump who threat- But none of this matters because of
misogynistic, and adulterous. Yet for flected on the totalitarianisms of the ened apocalyptic war on the Korean Cohn’s unshakable loyalty to Trump:
both men there is a pride in having 1930s and 1940s. He noted that they peninsula becomes the heroic peace-
shown unwavering loyalty to the boss differed from the controlling ideolo- maker of the 2019 State of the Union Just compare that with all the
while others were deserting him. gies of the past precisely in their em- address who singlehandedly saved hundreds of “respectable” guys
Christie recounts the episode as brace of the idea that infallible truths Korea from the terrible war he himself who make careers out of boasting
a crisis in which he himself showed a can change with the leader’s desires: had portended. The gut instincts that about their uncompromising integ-
cool head. There is no moral anxiety. told him to rattle his saber then told rity but have absolutely no loyalty.
Sims does wonder about the campaign The orthodoxies of the past didn’t him to scatter rose petals at Kim’s feet. They think only about what’s best
surrogates who went on air to speak up change, or at least didn’t change for them and don’t think twice
for Trump: “How could people go on rapidly. In mediaeval Europe the 3
The Complete Works of George Or- about stabbing a friend in the back
TV, night after night, and defend things Church dictated what you could well (London: Secker and Warburg, if the friend becomes a problem.
they knew in their heart were indefen- believe, but at least it allowed you 1998), Vol. 12, p. 504. What I liked most about Roy Cohn
Robert J. Shiller
A rational voice, relevant worldwide
Narrative Economics
Robert J. Shiller
Available Autumn
Working closely with
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was that he would do just the oppo- in difficult circumstances. And this is
site. Roy was the sort of guy who’d where Trump’s cultivation of unpredict-
be there at your hospital bed, long ability finally works against him. When
+% after everyone else had bailed out, you are predictably unpredictable, you
literally standing by you to the are also predictably disloyal. Christie
death. and Sims are both utterly medieval in
their complaints about how they were
Loyalty is, of course, the lowest of betrayed. Their books are like cahiers
the virtues. It is honor among thieves, de doléances from the ancien régime, in
the operating code of every mafia. which it was permissible to report one’s
Trump evoked it in precisely these sufferings so long as they were blamed
)
"
! terms on December 16 when, after Mi- on the royal advisers, but never, ever on
chael Cohen, Cohn’s rather anemic de- the monarch. Christie was done in by
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scendant as consigliere, cut a deal with
prosecutors, he tweeted that “Michael
Jared Kushner, whose father Christie
had put in jail when he was US attor-
Cohen . . . became a ‘Rat.’” In this at ney for New Jersey, but Donald, he be-
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" least we might see a consistency with lieves, still loves him. Sims was undone
the ideals set out in The Art of the Deal: by the jealousies of people around the
uncompromising integrity ranks way former chief of staff John Kelly, but
below “literally standing by you to the he still loves his master. Yet Sims, who
death.” Cohen, like all the other poten- has infinitely more insight than Chris-
tial rats trapped by Robert Mueller’s tie, does realize, when he is eventually
terriers, should honor the code of loy- shafted, that his beloved Trump “hadn’t
alty, take the rap, and keep his mouth lifted a finger for countless loyal aides
shut. But there is a twist. Loyalty is before me, and I’m sure he wouldn’t
supposed to go both ways. As so many for countless loyal aides to come.” One
of his enablers have discovered, Trump would hope that reading these books
demands it but does not return it. would transform any loyal aide into a
The point of loyalty is mutual predict- rat. The consequences might be more
ability. It is an assurance of how another unpredictable than even Trump could
person will behave toward you, even handle.
FINAL
My body has gone.
It doesn’t need me anymore.
It reminds me of myself,
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sharing old stories.
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I’m reconceiving everything I knew:
the history of upper New York State,
AMERICANS
The Hundreds Deported Americans Dance for Me When I Die Militarism and Capitalism
LAUREN BERLANT and Life after Deportation to Mexico CRISTIAN ALARCÓN SIMEON MAN, A. NAOMI PAIK,
KATHLEEN STEWART BETH C. CALDWELL Nick Caistor and and MELINA PAPPADEMOS,
Marcela López Levy, translators issue editors
Latin America in Translation/En An issue of Radical History Review (133)
Traducción/Em Tradução
Kristen Ghodsee
QUEER TEMPORALITIES
edited by
OF THE PHALLUS
Mario li
Biagio
and
Vincenin t
An to n
Lépinay
JANE GALLOP
Second World, GLQ at 25 From Russia with Code
JENNIFER DEVERE BRODY Sexuality, Disability, Programming Migrations
Second Sex
Socialist Women’s Activism and and MARCIA OCHOA , issue editors and Aging in Post-Soviet Times
Global Solidarity during the Cold War An issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian Queer Temporalities of the Phallus MARIO BIAGIOLI and
KRISTEN GHODSEE and Gay Studies (25:1) JANE GALLOP VINCENT LÉPINAY, editors
approves this new work and invisibly ing the original title), runs up the out-
pulls a few strings. An art-school pal, side of the art school building to find
formerly a competitor but with the req- Kurt’s newest work through the open
uisite business background, now offers window. The “painting” that Kurt does
to represent Kurt. is far and away the most persuasive and
His first show happens, it is 1966, the articulate I have seen performed on
newspapers and television are present. film; it is done by a former assistant of
A wacky press conference in a curious Richter’s.
place called Wuppertal. Some chap The script by Donnersmarck, though,
RODERICK MACFARQUHAR
Learn More at (1930–2019)
mitpress.mit.edu/nyrb We mourn the death of Roderick MacFarquhar,
a long-standing contributor and friend.
Joan Miró:
Birth of
the World
Joan Miró. “Hirondelle Amour.” 1933–34. Oil on canvas. Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller.
© 2019 Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
1
moma.org/
spring
mune cells blow themselves up in turned red. . . . She withdrew her ily history, she suffered extreme “one of the first fifty patients to try
the process. Others nip off parts of left hand from her shirt, and put stress, sleeplessness, and a case of one of the greatest developments in
the infection and carry them away the pair of them side by side. Now strep throat that might have kicked the history of medicine. . . . He stood at
to be assessed in a defense hub it was more glaring, her left hand her immune system into overdrive. the very edge of human achievement
called a lymph node. There, the white and a touch puffy, which as modern science challenged one of
bits of infection are shared with reflected the regular inflamma- This list of possible causes should the most enduring and effective kill-
swarms of passing defenders called tion, her right hand red and visibly come with a prominent caveat, as the ing techniques in the pantheon of
T cells and B cells. These are the swollen. reason why most people develop auto- disease.” Richtel places our new un-
immune system’s most advanced “My immune system,” she said, immune disorders is still obscure. As derstanding of the immune system “on
fighters; they are, in fact, two of “is always attacking me.” for Bob Hoff, despite intensive study par with the greatest human achieve-
the most effective biological struc- of his immune system at the NIH, pre- ments” and quotes an immunologist at
tures in the world. What makes T Linda Segre’s autoimmune disorder, cisely how his body prevents HIV from UCLA asserting that recent discover-
cells and B cells so remarkable is rheumatoid arthritis, is marked by pro- behaving in its typical destructive way ies are “as significant as the discovery
that they are extremely specific. found pain and swelling with destruc- remains a mystery. of antibiotics.”
Each one of the billions of them tion of her joints. Of the genesis of her His enthusiasm reflects that of other
in your body is tailored through malady, Richtel writes: writers on the immune system. Books
a quirk of genetics to recognize a W hile successfully communicat- on the subject are often marketed with
very specific infection. Once a T The clues to and the catalyst of her ing the science of Allison and Honjo the promise that we can fine-tune our
cell or B cell finds its evil mate, illness were actually there all along and related clinical advances to a lay defenses by adopting a specific life-
its infection doppelgänger, it can to be discovered if given proper reader, Richtel occasionally lapses style, such as daily meditation, a diet
set in motion a powerful defense, scrutiny. In addition to her fam- into hyperbole: he calls Greenstein of “anti-inflammatory” foods, and
following hard on the innate reac-
tion, bringing defenders trained
specifically to bounce out this par-
ticular antigen.
Rediscover ★ Library of America // Spring 2019
The conundrum posed by cancer— JOHN O’HARA: Four Novels of the 1930s: Appointment in Samarra / Butterfield 8 / Hope of Heaven / Pal Joey
why can tumors with characteristics
distinct from healthy tissues evade the Steven Goldleaf, editor // Scintillating tales of the desperate pursuit of pleasure and status in Jazz Age America.
immune system’s surveillance?—is an-
swered by Richtel, who draws on Hon- 674 pp. • $40 cloth • loa #313
jo’s and Allison’s research:
ANN PETRY: The Street, The Narrows CORNELIUS RYAN: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far
The last few decades of immunol-
ogy . . . have taught us [that] the Farah Jasmine Griffin, editor Rick Atkinson, editor
immune system . . . can be duped.
Sometimes a disease takes root In one volume, two landmark novels about For the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a deluxe collector’s edition
and starts to grow and spread and the terrible power of race in America. gathering two gripping masterpieces of military history.
then tricks the immune system into
806 pp. • $35 cloth • loa #314 With 88 pages of illustrations and full color endpaper maps.
thinking it isn’t so bad after all. It
deceives the entire defense system 1008 pp. • $45 cloth • #318
into helping it grow. This is what
happened to Jason.
It would be deceptive—dishon-
While Davis enthusiastically ap- est—to write about new medicines
plauds the landmark discoveries of without mentioning the financial
Allison and Honjo, he also offers an problems that stand in our way:
intelligent and insightful analysis of the we sorely need new international
field’s unknowns: institutes and different ways of
funding medical research and
This is still only a beginning. We medicines, where the well-being of
now know of over twenty other humanity, and other life on earth,
brake receptors in the immune is paramount and financial profit
system. Most of these switch off irrelevant. I hope this is the brave
Through June 16 metmuseum.org Catalogue available specific types of immune cell: new world that awaits us.
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC Natural Killer cells, macrophages,
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and dendritic cells, T cells, B cells or This is an honorable hope but realis-
The Japan Foundation, with the cooperation of the Tokyo National Museum others. We must now test, in aca- tically elusive, as societies struggle to
and Ishiyamadera Temple.
demic labs and companies large incentivize the high-risk endeavor of
and small, whether or not antibod- developing breakthrough treatments,
ies that block these receptors, in- with their high rate of failure, while
It is made possible by the Mary Livingston Griggs and Mary Griggs Burke dividually or in combination, will containing unregulated greed when
Foundation Fund, 2015; the Estate of Brooke Astor; the E. Rhodes and unleash immune cells to tackle dif- success occurs.
Leona B. Carpenter Foundation; and Ann M. Spruill and Daniel H. Cantwell.
ferent types of cancer. The research honored by the 2018
The catalogue is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Nobel Prize is a historic advance that
the Florence and Herbert Irving Fund; the Charles A. Greenfield Fund;
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation; the Mary Livingston Griggs
Furthermore, Davis writes that we are already has restored the lives of many
and Mary Griggs Burke Foundation Fund, 2015; the Parnassus Foundation; unable to predict which types of cancer with cancer. But sadly, Davis notes,
and Richard and Geneva Hofheimer Memorial Fund. will be most affected by releasing the there are still large gaps in our knowl-
Tosa Mitsuoki, Portrait-Icon of Murasaki Shikibu (detail), Edo Period (1615–1868), brakes on a particular type of immune edge of how to optimally unleash the
17th century. Ishiyamadera Temple, Shiga Prefecture. Courtesy of Ishiyamadera Temple. cell. The system, he avers, “is too com- immune system. After treatment with
Photo by Kanai Morio.
plex and our understanding too slight.” a PD -1 blocker, Jason Greenstein’s lym-
In that regard, there is a pressing phoma shrank, but then rapidly grew
need to “personalize” the use of cur- again, ending his life.
ĆĢúä
Èâȳ®
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Swiveling Man
Nathaniel Rich
The Life of Saul Bellow: in American culture: insisting on the He came close to writing books about The Six-Day War,” 1967); the skyscrap-
Love and Strife, 1965–2005 writer’s need for independence from Hubert Humphrey and Robert Ken- ers of downtown Chicago are “armored
by Zachary Leader. worldly affairs while throwing himself nedy, and he wrote letters to the editor like Eisenstein’s Teutonic knights star-
Knopf, 767 pp., $40.00 into them. Bellow was much closer to and published articles in the Chicago ing over the ice of no-man’s-land at
F. Scott Fitzgerald than Thomas Pyn- Sun-Times about student protests and Alexander Nevsky” (“Chicago: The
“Guys, I’m rich.” chon on the novelist-sociability scale. the Johnson administration. He also City That Was, the City That Is,” 1983).
So begins the second volume of He joined boards, political commit- attacked authors who wrote about “po- In his nonfiction Bellow was often po-
Zachary Leader’s Life of Saul Bellow, tees, and neighborhood study groups. litical campaigns, wars, assassinations, litical. But he was rarely polemical.
and so begins the second half of Bel- He developed an international reputa- youth movements” instead of “private This got him in trouble. The more fu-
low’s life. The publication of Herzog in tion as a charmer at dinner parties; a feelings, personal loyalties, love.” One rious the political debate, the less tol-
1964 had elevated a respected if under- predilection for alligator shoes, Savile thinks of Moses Herzog, swiveling in erance for nuance, uncertainty, moral
selling midcareer novelist to the status Row fedoras, camel-hair overcoats, consecutive lines from Tolstoy (“to be complexity. As his fame grew, Bellow
of publishing darling, national celeb- and bespoke suits in wool and shan- free is to be released from historical came under increasing pressures to
rity, golden-fingertipped literary divin- tung (“a king’s haberdashery would limitation”) to Hegel (“the essence of take a stand on the issues of the day.
ity. Bellow’s income that year was the not have surpassed his wardrobe,” says human life [is] to be derived from his- But he refused to be an activist, a re-
equivalent in today’s dollars of approx- the writer Dana Gioia, who met him in tory”). Bellow swiveled in just this way fusal that was as artistically heroic as it
imately $1 million. It was higher was personally disastrous.
Dominique Nabokov
each of the next three years. He In 1965 he defied more than
began to turn down lucrative a dozen of the nations’ leading
awards and lecture fees to avoid writers to attend a White House
the tax liability. “The earlier Saul Festival of the Arts, after Rob-
had disappeared,” said his friend ert Lowell had denounced the
Mitzi McClosky, referring to the event in a letter sent to The New
Saul who was tyrannized by his York Times. “Every serious art-
father and the financial success ist,” wrote Lowell, “knows that he
of his businessmen brothers, the cannot enjoy public celebrations
Saul who hustled to secure time without making subtle public
for his work amid low advances, commitments.” Bellow disagreed.
grants, and teaching gigs, the Despite publishing letters in the
Saul aggrieved by being pigeon- Times and the Chicago Sun-
holed as a “Jewish writer.” The Times condemning the Johnson
new Saul had made it, all right. administration’s policies in Viet-
But he was no less besieged. If nam, he saw no reason to follow
the great enemy of the writer was, Lowell’s example. “The President
as he often put it in speeches and intends, in his own way, to en-
essays, the “frantic distraction” courage American artists,” said
that intruded on “the quiet of Bellow. “I consider this event to
the soul that art demands,” that be an official function, not a po-
enemy now came swarming over litical occasion which demands
the barricades. agreement with Mr. Johnson on
It came in the form of family all policies of his administration.”
members hawking investment Saul Bellow, Brattleboro, Vermont, June 1989; photograph by Dominique Nabokov He later called his decision to at-
schemes in Miami real estate and tend “foolish,” given the uproar,
Oklahoma oilfields; grifting accoun- 1976 as a graduate student); and a wide, between engagement and disengage- which made the possibility of a digni-
tants; literary agents touting stock tips; ever-growing circle of friends with ment, from jealous isolation to cocktail fied ceremony impossible—an expres-
divorce lawyers (his third divorce, out whom he took pains to keep in touch. hour, morning to afternoon and back sion not so much of regret as disgust for
of an eventual four, may have set the His hostility to distraction was more again. the showmanship of the other writers.
record for the most expensive in Illi- figurative than literal. His working day
nois history); academic and literary in- ran from nine until noon or one, but it
stitutions offering positions and prizes was not inviolable; Alexandra, his wife If novelists have some responsibility This would be, in retrospect, a quaint
and other compensated entanglements; from Humboldt’s Gift to More Die of to write about the political crises of prelude to the attacks Bellow would
writers hoisting protest letters; invita- Heartbreak, an accomplished math- their day, what is the appropriate reg- receive for To Jerusalem and Back, a
tions to judge the Booker Prize, the ematician who required total isolation ister? And what form should such writ- portrait of Israel drawn from report-
MacArthur “genius” award, and the in order to work, reports with aston- ing take? Bellow didn’t think highly of age, memoir, and, in the spirit of the
Miss USA Beauty Pageant; and a new ishment that when the phone rang, he journalism. When Albert Corde in The Committee on Social Thought, a deep
class of professional admirers (“career “engaged in these very lively conversa- Dean’s December is praised for being “a reading of philosophy, history, and lit-
parasites,” he called them) who sought tions, and then he’d go back to work journalist of unusual talent,” he replies, erature, mixing his own observations
his mentorship, founded the Saul Bel- with just as much energy and zest as be- “Don’t you believe it. There is no such with those of Stendhal and Sinyavsky
low Journal, and proposed writing his fore.” The afternoons left him plenty of thing. That’s just the way journalists and Sartre. “Perhaps to remain a poet
biography. There were also the girl- time for his abundant correspondence pump, promote, gild and bedizen them- in such circumstances is also to reach
friends, mistresses, and wives—and (see Benjamin Taylor’s Saul Bellow: selves, and build up their profession, the heart of politics,” wrote Bellow,
with them, the three sons, though these Letters), long walks, and his academic which is basically a bad profession.” But explaining his method. “Then human
were more easily evaded (Bellow’s pa- responsibilities, which he assumed with Bellow was a dogged, deeply perceptive feelings, human experience, the human
rental strategy, in the words of Adam an enthusiasm that far outpaced finan- journalist, and for decades returned to form and face, recover their proper
Bellow, was “benign neglect until their cial need or professional obligation. the form when he wished to write about place—the foreground.” He used the
minds had matured enough to be some- He taught university literature semi- matters of urgent public interest. A novelist’s devices of analogy, descrip-
what interesting”). But the incursion nars for nearly his entire adult life. Be- family connection in Israel was struck tion, and deep questioning, always
that most acutely tested Bellow came tween 1962 and 1993 he served on the by his reporting style: “He listened not being careful to avoid the imperatives
from the “great public noise”: the con- Committee on Social Thought at the only to the story, but beyond that: he of activist writing. This enraged par-
vulsive debates over race, war, gender, University of Chicago, the august in- listened with all his senses, to body lan- tisans and close observers of Israel.
and inner- city crime that dominated terdisciplinary graduate program that guage, to intonation, noticing all details The Jerusalem Post attacked him for
American life in the decades following championed a wide reading of the fun- thoroughly and in depth.” mimicking “Arab and left-wing propa-
Herzog’s publication. Bellow reigned damental works of Western thought. The reported pieces in It All Adds ganda against the State of Israel”; for
as the nation’s preeminent novelist In 1970, at the height of his fame, he Up, a collection of Bellow’s nonfiction Noam Chomsky, Leader writes, “Bel-
during much of this time, a station that agreed to chair the committee, re- reissued last year by Penguin Classics, low’s book might have been written by
forced him, again and again, to con- cruiting new appointments, quarreling flash with such sensual detail. A Spanish the Israeli Information Ministry.” Both
front the paradox that lay at the heart with deans over bureaucratic demands, commandante in postwar Madrid, “lean, camps held Bellow guilty of humaniz-
of his identity as a writer. managing tensions between professors, correct, compressed, and rancorous,” ing the enemy.
“It excites me, it distresses me to be and evaluating the academic achieve- carries a black-market white loaf “under “The Chicago Book,” as Bellovian
so immersed,” wrote Bellow during ments of art historians, philosophers, his arm like a swagger stick” (“Spanish scholars now refer to it, was to be a
this period. He was referring to a re- and political theorists—grueling, often Letter,” 1948); the bloated Egyptian work of nonfiction in the mode of To
porting trip to Jerusalem, but he might dull work that might have cost him a dead in the streets of Sinai “resemble Jerusalem and Back but was never
have been describing his new position novel’s worth of labor. balloon figures in a parade” (“Israel: completed. Bellow instead harvested
the draft for use in lectures, essays, The response was not quite as deco- gerous, provoking “envious rage and and not upon individual vision.” He
and The Dean’s December, in which rous from students and faculty (“Bel- murder,” and he supported the Con- would lecture his sons: “Don’t disap-
the university dean Albert Corde in- low: False and Racist?” was the title gress of Racial Equality, for which he point me, don’t be one of those people
vites personal and professional trouble of a protest letter in The Chicago Ma- wrote the preface to a book to be titled who just line up.” Bellow’s antipathy to
by publishing in Harper’s two essays roon, the University of Chicago student “They Shall Overcome.” The essay at- just lining up derived from his view of
about the city’s criminal justice system paper), who were shocked by Bellow’s tacked the rural white poor, whom he what literature should be, and by exten-
and inner- city crime. The resentment depiction of neighborhoods that in his held responsible for much of the na- sion, how artists should direct their en-
stirred up by the articles—“Liberals youth were inhabited by immigrants tion’s racial animosity and violence. ergies, and it tended to overwhelm any
found him reactionary. Conservatives who “improved themselves and moved “Rural America has had a long history political beliefs he held.
called him crazy”—is the same Bellow upward” and that now he described as of overvaluation,” he wrote, thanks to Broadly speaking, he was a young
anticipated he would receive should dystopic, third-world, savage. In the the mistaken notion that Trotskyite who migrated, in stages, to a
he publish the Chicago Book, and that inner- city schools, “76 percent black fuddy- duddy conservativism. But even
he did receive when he let loose about and Puerto Rican,” the children “are everyone was better and sounder the slightest scrutiny revealed inconsis-
Chicago in interviews and speeches. like little Kaspar Hausers—blank, un- on the farm, in the woods and hills, tencies that would alienate any natural
Leader gives an agonizing account formed, they live convulsively, in tur- less anomic, more self-reliant, ally—what he called his “obstinacy to
of Bellow’s two Jefferson lectures in bulence and darkness of mind. . . . But fairer, more American. This is sim- mark my disagreement with all par-
1977, sponsored by the National En- they are unlike poor innocent Kaspar ply not so. In provincial America, ties,” and what Leader sees, more dec-
dowment for the Humanities. Bellow in that they have a demonic knowledge North no less than South, lives the orously, as a compulsion “to wound, to
delivered the second, more tenden- of sexual acts, guns, drugs, and of vices, most unhappy, troubled and alien- force his listeners and readers to face
tious lecture in the Gold Coast Room which are not vices here.” A similar up- ated portion of the population. . . . what they have chosen not to face.”
of the Drake Hotel, before an audience roar followed the publication of The The glamor of Confederacy and The force of Bellow’s opposition to the
of museum donors, university bigwigs, Dean’s December. It did not help that insurrection, of “tradition” and Vietnam War and US nuclear policy
and arts club members. Insulting these Bellow, in his defense, explained that he “gentility” has been laid in poster was matched by his opposition to the
paragons of American prosperity was speaking up “for the black under- colors over provincial pride, back- civil disobedience of their youthful
from the start, Bellow spoke of a feel- class and telling the whites they’re not wardness, xenophobia and rage. protesters. If Bellow was so antiwar,
ing that “this miraculously successful approaching the problem correctly.” A an earlier biographer wondered, “why
country has done evil under the Sun, novel intended as a protest against “the then was he embattled with anti-war
has spoiled and contaminated nature, dehumanization of the blacks in big cit- Such bona fides would win Bellow no people when they met?” Bellow voted
waged cruel wars, failed in its obliga- ies” furthered the dehumanization. public mercy, however, and his political for Adlai Stevenson but hated “Ste-
tions to its weaker citizens.” The au- Leader points out that racial injustice statements brought increasing scorn venson people,” which Leader trans-
dience also failed to be charmed by had been a dominant theme for Bellow in his final decades. What Adam Bel- lates as “liberals interested in political
Bellow’s insinuation that wealthy Chi- since the beginning of his career. In the low called his “irreverent attitude to- personalities and electoral politics.”
cagoans were complicit in their city’s fragment “Acatla” (1940), an interra- ward reigning intellectual authorities” He ridiculed women’s liberationists
deterioration, immured in their Lake cial couple is victimized by prejudice, had been responsible for his singular and hippies but supported George
Shore Drive high-rises, in “strange iso- and Bellow’s first completed novel, The voice—vernacular scrambled with el- McGovern against Richard Nixon in
lation” from the reality of the streets Very Dark Trees (1942), was about a evated, crude with transcendent, Hum- 1972. In the 1970s and 1980s he joined
below or, worse, had escaped to the white man who wakes up black (after boldt Park with Hyde Park. Carried a series of conservative foreign policy
suburbs, from which wafted the “dank selling it to a publisher Bellow threw into the political sphere, the same im- groups, only to resign from each in
and depressing odors of cultural mil- the only copy into a furnace). In essays pulse translated into a lifelong aversion turn when they issued statements in
dew.” The hometown Nobel laureate written in the 1950s Bellow attacked to ideological factions, with their en- his name with which he vehemently
was greeted with “muted applause” depictions of black primitivism, later forced orthodoxies, slogans, and pub- disagreed.
and largely ignored at the cocktail espoused most flagrantly by Norman lic mantras—any group in which “the His reputation as a conservative grew
reception. Mailer in “The White Negro,” as dan- emphasis falls on collective experience after a 1988 New York Times Magazine
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March 21, 2019 27
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profile of his friend Allan Bloom, the Rain King, though wildly divergent
which quoted Bellow’s remarks mock- in sensibility and plot, shared a nar-
ing a student movement at Stanford rative emphasis on the forging of an
NEW FROM to cancel a Western civilization class
on the grounds that it was racist, re-
identity and, for Bellow himself, the
forging of a personal style. Later in life
marks that to this day haunt his ghost: he regretted, as the narrator of The
“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Bellarosa Connection (1989) puts it,
Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to “snoozing through” the Holocaust. But
read them.” When he was asked by a he went great-public with Herzog for
Washington Post interviewer about good; like the Romantic scholar Moses
his unflattering portrayal of a female Herzog, Bellow became the author
character in his story “What Kind of of a “new sort of history . . . personal,
The Privileged Poor Day Did You Have?,” a woman who is engagée.” In the later novels, Bellow
How Elite Colleges Are “old-fashioned and sexually enslaved achieved what he could not do in his
Failing Disadvantaged Students without a mind of her own,” Bellow essays, speeches, and reportage: he al-
responded, “Well, I’m sorry girls—but lowed the great public noise of his age
Anthony Abraham Jack
many of you are like that, very much into the innermost reaches of his char-
“The Privileged Poor is three books so. It’s going to take a lot more than acters’ thoughts and feelings. He made
in one: an engrossing personal a few books by Germaine Greer or the public personal.
whatshername Betty Friedan to root These novels perform a double trick.
memoir, a collection of rigorous out completely the Sleeping Beauty They dramatize Bellow’s own struggle
scholarship, and a powerful syndrome.” Bellow nevertheless con- to connect the outer world with his
manifesto for a new movement to sidered himself “some sort of liberal,” inner world; and, in so doing, they pro-
despite his distaste for the left’s “taboo vide a model for how to pursue what
improve the lives of low-income
on open discussion.” Charlie Citrine and Artur Sammler call
students at elite universities. He violated a major taboo on the “higher consciousness” without fleeing
It’s an essential work, humane right, however, when he suggested in society and joining a monastery. “The
and candid, that challenges and Ravelstein (2000), his fictionalized eu- practical questions have thus become
logy for Bloom, that his late friend was the ultimate questions,” says Moses
expands our understanding of
a homosexual who had died of AIDS. Herzog. “To live in an inspired condi-
the lives of contemporary college Bloom’s friends had known of his ho- tion, to know truth, to be free, to love
students.” mosexuality but kept it private out of another, to consummate existence . . .
fear that the revelation would destroy is not reserved for gods, kings, poets,
—Paul Tough, author of his reputation in conservative circles. priests, shrines, but belongs to man-
Helping Children Succeed “They see themselves as having a spe- kind and to all of existence.” The path
cial pious duty to protect Bloom,” Bel- to enlightenment lies not in renouncing
low told the Times, once again forced the world but in seeing it more clearly.
to defend himself. “I can understand So we get Sammler emerging at
Open that, because for them it’s not just a night onto Riverside Drive, its urine-
friend, it’s a movement.” The piece was soaked phone booths lit bright by
The Progressive Case for titled “With Friends Like Saul Bellow” the streetlamps: “All metaphysicians
Free Trade, Immigration, and illustrated with an image of a dag- please note. Here is how it is. You will
and Global Capital ger; a Wall Street Journal article about never see more clearly. And what do
the controversy was accompanied by a you make of it?” Citrine seeking tran-
Kimberly Clausing drawing of a man being stabbed in the scendence in daily ephemera: “Often
“Global integration will not work back. I sat at the end of the day remember-
“I couldn’t be both truthful and cam- ing everything that had happened,
if it means local disintegration.
ouflaged.” Bellow meant true to the re- in minute detail.” And Albert Corde
Kim Clausing’s important book quirements of fiction, which demands throwing himself headlong, heed-
lays out the economics of glo- that any believable character must be lessly, into a painful scrutiny of the
balization and, more important, full of contradictions, secrets, regrets. Chicago Criminal Courts Building and
For Ravelstein to succeed as fiction, Cabrini Green: as long as “the spirit
shows how globalization can be
it required “the elasticity provided by of the time” doesn’t “come to us with
made to work for the vast majority sin.” Absent disclosure of Bloom’s se- some kind of reality, as facts of expe-
of Americans.” cret life, the character would be false— rience, then all we can have instead
a two- dimensional public figure instead of good and evil is . . .well, concepts.
—Lawrence H. Summers,
of the private person, who was the only Then we’ll never learn how the soul is
Harvard University, one worth writing a novel about. worked on.”
former Treasury Secretary Edward Shils, a don of the Committee
on Social Thought with whom Bellow
T here were two kinds of writers, Bel- fell out late in their lives, condemned
low said in a 1975 interview: “great- Bellow’s refusal to “take sides.” A
public writers” and “small-public “great novelist,” groused Shils, “has to
writers.” The second category was have some moral sense. That has been
Hattiesburg typified by the modernists, who em- Bellow’s blind spot.” Shils cited Bel-
phasized stylistic artistry over social low’s “self-indulgent” characters and
An American City protest: Flaubert, Joyce, and Baude- Bellow’s own self-indulgence, “as he
in Black and White laire. The great-public writers, who had floated from one woman to the other.”
William Sturkey largely fallen out of fashion, “thought Leader is unstinting on Bellow’s per-
of themselves as spokesmen for a na- sonal moral failings—the infidelities
Belknap Press tional conscience. They addressed and cruelties to the women who loved
“Hattiesburg is not connected in grand issues of social justice and po- him, the high-handedness with close
litical concern.” He cited as examples friends who asked for favors, profes-
the popular mind with civil rights
Dreiser, Dickens, Zola, Upton Sinclair, sional underlings (his agents nick-
history in the way of Selma and and Sherwood Anderson—and him- named him “God”), and his sons. But
Montgomery, but Sturkey’s vi- self. Bellow did not, in the interview, the novels themselves do articulate a
brant history makes a strong case acknowledge that he had started out as consistent moral vision. They reveal
a small-public writer. Dangling Man, how the soul is worked on by an age of
that, to understand how the civil The Victim, The Adventures of Augie radical social upheaval—and how the
rights movement emerged, it’s March, Seize the Day, and Henderson soul must respond.
essential to spend time there.”
—Publishers Weekly New York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Hilary Reid, Marketing
hup.harvard.edu Associate; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights; Yongsun
Bark, Distribution.
Unnatural Naturalism
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Victorian Radicals: they ostensibly opposed, since the
Christina Rossetti:
Poetry in Art That “reality”—true to the imagi-
edited by Susan Owens nation rather than fact— points to
and Nicholas Tromans. a central difficulty in assessing the
Yale University Press, 192 pp., $40.00 Pre-Raphaelites’ legacy. According
to Ruskin, they wanted nothing more
It’s common for restive artists to con- than to paint with the greatest accu-
clude that the current generation has racy possible. “As far as in them lies,”
lost its way—less common, perhaps, to he insisted, “they will either draw what
look back more than four hundred years they see, or what they suppose to have
for a solution. When a small band of been the actual facts of the scene they
would-be reformers met at the London desire to represent, irrespective of any
house of John Everett Millais in 1848 conventional rules of picture-making.”
and emerged as the Pre-Raphaelite This is a defense of realism that affords
Brotherhood, they were deliberately considerable room for making things
rejecting not just the work of their most up. The Pre-Raphaelites often painted
prominent contemporaries but a long- historical pictures, including sacred
established consensus on the develop- ones, from contemporary models, with-
ment of European art. (In addition to out attempting to idealize or prettify
Millais, the original PRB, as it styled Frederick Sandys: Medea, 1866 –1868 the results.
itself, included Dante Gabriel Rossetti Some of the outrage that greeted
and his brother William, who would Ruskin, who brooked no such distinc- One reason Birmingham proved so their early work appears to have been
later help document the movement, tion, and their influence on subsequent accommodating to the reformers was triggered by this practice: Charles
the painters William Holman Hunt artists like William Morris, Victo- that its industry had typically been Dickens, for example, notoriously tore
and James Collinson, the sculptor rian Radicals assimilates them into a based in small workshops, rather than into Millais’s Christ in the House of
Thomas Woolner, and the future critic broader history of resistance to indus- large factories as in Manchester. An- His Parents (1849–1850), denouncing
Frederic George Stephens.) Though trial capitalism in Britain, a movement other was a tradition of local activism the Christ as “a blubbering red-haired
Raphael’s influence dated back to the that itself sought to transform present rooted in liberal politics, which aided boy in a nightgown” and its Virgin as
sixteenth century, the idea that paint- conditions by looking to the past. The in establishing the city’s first public “a kneeling woman so horrible in her
ers should follow rules derived from his catalog pays tribute to three genera- library and art gallery in the 1860s, ugliness that . . . she would stand out
practice had hardened into orthodoxy tions of artists for whom the growth followed in 1885 by the simultaneous from the rest of the company as a mon-
after Sir Joshua Reynolds delivered his of places like Birmingham, and all it opening of the present museum build- ster in the vilest cabaret in France or
Discourses (1769–1790) to the Royal represented, was anathema. The con- ings (the gallery now folded in) and in the lowest gin-shop in England.”
Academy. tributors to the volume recognize the the nearby Municipal School of Art. It Millais’s painting, which hangs in the
Hunt’s retrospective account of the irony, even as they recount how a city also helped— eventually—that Morris’s Tate, does not appear in Victorian
movement contended that it was those known for its manufacturing boom and main partner was a disaffected native Radicals, but the catalog does include
rules, rather than Raphael himself, scorned by a German visitor in 1842 of Birmingham, Edward Burne-Jones. Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in
that had proved the stumbling block— as “a very desert” for fine arts became Burne-Jones had long sought to keep the Temple (1854–1860), for which
“Pre-Raphaelitism,” he said, “is not home to one of the strongest collections as clear of his birthplace as possible. By the artist traveled to the Holy Land in
Pre-Raphaelism.” The group’s princi- of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world, as 1877, however, a rapprochement was search of ethnographic accuracy, only
pal champion, John Ruskin, insisted well as a major center for the craft re- underway, signaled most immediately to find himself compelled to model his
that “nature only” was their model. vival at the turn of the century. by the installation of a stained-glass rabbis after Jews in London when those
But there is no question that nature, Repelled by what he called “the window he had designed for Morris & in Jerusalem refused to sit for him, and
as the Brotherhood saw it, was heav- depressing and monotonous circum- Co. in a church in the center of town. to adapt the temple itself from a rep-
ily mediated by art, especially that of stances of English manufacturing Further commissions for stained glass lica of the Alhambra at the Crystal
the late Middle Ages and early Renais- life,” Ruskin found his ideal antith- followed, including a magnificent Last Palace.
sance. Victorian Radicals, the cata- esis to the depredations of the factory Judgment for the city’s cathedral. A Other pictures tackled modern life
log of an exhibition drawn from the system in the unalienated labor of the loan exhibition of eleven Burne-Jones more directly: the fatal trajectory of
collections of the Birmingham Mu- medieval craftsman. This was also paintings accompanied the opening of a prostitute in Rossetti’s unfinished
seums and currently traveling to mul- the ideal that lay behind the decorat- the new Birmingham Museum and Art Found, for instance— here represented
tiple venues in the US, begins its story ing firm Morris founded with several Gallery in 1885, and two years later by three early sketches— or the ex-
with those it calls, paradoxically, “the other artists in 1861, as well as the the museum commissioned its first ploitation of labor in Henry Wallis’s
pre-Raphaelite avant-garde”: artists broader Arts and Crafts movement work by the artist for its permanent The Stone Breaker (1857), with its sol-
who led the way by rediscovering the it inspired. Not all sympathizers with collection— an acquisition celebrated emn image of a worker’s corpse set
achievement of predecessors who had the movement shared Morris’s in- in 1891 with a major show of Pre- against the dying light of the sun. Such
often been dismissed as primitive. creasing commitment to socialism. Raphaelite paintings and drawings, the pictures also, of course, “suppose . . .
The initial impetus of the PRB was But the spirit of communal production largest to date. the actual facts”: they are staged genre
more aesthetic than political. But be- persisted, as did the firm’s program of As is so often the case, the radicals paintings, not direct transcriptions of
cause of the group’s identification with design reform. were being underwritten by the forces a scene. Presumably it is works like
these to which Tim Barringer refers Unlike Turner, who fits with com- It’s all the more striking, then, that
in his catalog essay when he speaks of parative ease into a familiar history in one respect these radicals scarcely
the “searing visual representations of of modern art from the French Im- broke with tradition at all: their con-
the real” that constitute one dimension pressionists to Abstract Expression- tinued bias toward the literary. The
of Pre-Raphaelite radicalism. They ism, the heirs of the Pre-Raphaelites academic doctrine according to which
remain, however, a distinct minority are at once harder to trace and more history painting ranked at the very top
in the catalog as a whole, which is far various. Victorian Radicals concen- of the hierarchy and still life at the bot-
more given to the fanciful and decora- trates primarily on the line that leads tom had its origins in a long-standing
tive impulses in the art of Rossetti and through Rossetti to the Aestheticism privileging of head over hand that the
his successors. of Morris and Burne-Jones—with its Pre-Raphaelites never really repudi-
Though Ruskin liked to pretend heightened emphasis on visual plea- ated, despite their connections to later
that the Pre-Raphaelites had simply sure, on art for art’s sake rather than craft movements. “Above all, they de-
discarded pictorial convention for the for representational or didactic pur- termined these pictures should at least
direct observation of nature, modern poses—and thence to the Arts and mean something,” Stephens had writ-
scholarship has instead emphasized Crafts movement that flourished in ten of them in 1860; and to judge by the
how much they learned about look- turn- of-the- century Birmingham. One works collected here, that determina-
ing from their visits to the museum— might also link Burne-Jones in particu- tion persisted well beyond the PRB’s
especially after the arrival of Jan
Private Collection
van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait at the
National Gallery in 1842. Elizabeth
Prettejohn has recently argued that
Rossetti taught himself to paint by
imitating what he understood of Van
Eyck’s method, as the Portrait’s un-
mixed color, meticulously rendered de-
in Poetry, Literature and Art.” Though thin dead body which waits the eternal quaint fruit-merchant men” now a story termination to wall out everything else:
it folded after four numbers, its char- term.” they tell their children. “I lock my door upon myself,/And bar
acteristic juxtapositions of word and Rossetti’s enigmatic fairy tale has them out; but who shall wall/Self from
image— every issue’s etching was ac- lent itself to a variety of interpretations, myself, most loathed of all?” Whether
companied by a poem—remained cen- The editors of Christina Rossetti: from an allegory of the nineteenth- or not such self-loathing was intensified
tral to Pre-Raphaelite practice. Poetry in Art—which is advertised as century marketplace to a coded tale in Rossetti’s case by the lingering ef-
While there’s admittedly nothing the first book to bring this material of lesbian desire. The drawing Gabriel fects of sexual abuse, as her biographer
literary about the glassware or the together— are surely right to argue that provided for the frontispiece of Goblin Jan Marsh has plausibly speculated, 2
dresses featured in Victorian Radi- she composed her work in an atmo- Market and Other Poems (1862) tends the impulse registered by the poem
cals, other decorative objects display sphere saturated with visual art. But to encourage the latter reading, with its hardly seems compatible with what
their affinities to literature: tiles de- unlike her brother, Christina appears image of the two sisters, “Golden head Barringer calls, in Victorian Radicals,
signed by Burne-Jones with figures never to have breathed easily in that air. by golden head,” locked in each other’s the Pre-Raphaelites’ “revelation of the
from fairy tale and myth; a wooden A profoundly committed Christian, arms. In 1973 Playboy published a set profusion and chromatic splendor of
chest ornamented in gold leaf, also by as Gabriel was not, and a finer poet, of colored illustrations of the poem the natural world.”
Burne-Jones, that has a scene from the she nonetheless lacked what might be by the artist and commercial illustra- One of the few illustrations of her
Garden of the Hesperides on its front called his incarnational aesthetic. “I tor Kinuko Craft in which he predict- work that the poet apparently singled
panel and poetry by Morris carved in am afraid you find art interfere[s] with ably made such erotic undertones more out for praise is an etiolated draw-
relief at either end; even a bedcover the legitimate exercise of anguish,” an explicit, even as he knowingly alluded ing by Charles Ricketts designed to
embroidered by a teacher of needle- exasperated Gabriel was already com- to a previous set of illustrations pro- accompany the publication of a late
work named Mary Jane Newill with plaining when she was still in her early duced by Arthur Rackham forty years poem entitled “An Echo from Wil-
quotations from an ode by William twenties, after she refused his offer earlier. Stephen Calloway’s chapter on lowwood” (1890). In the poem, “two
Wordsworth. to teach her. But the conflict between book illustration records, in addition wistful faces craving each for each”
Newill, whose bedcover dates from anguish and art—visual art, at least— to the Playboy version, a graphic novel gaze upon their reflections in a pool
1908, is among a number of women only intensified with her growing as- of 1984, represented here by an image of water, their imminent parting ren-
who appear in the catalog, especially ceticism. She didn’t reject images, of the bare-breasted sisters embracing. dered visible, paradoxically, when “a
as it approaches the Arts and Crafts obviously, but the evidence suggests Rossetti’s original title for the poem sudden ripple” disturbs the water’s
movement. Although women were by that she grew increasingly wary of was “A Peep at the Goblins,” and sub- surface and causes their images “to
definition excluded from the Broth- their appeal. sequent artists clearly found it a power- vanish out of reach.” Ricketts’s draw-
erhood, they were influential in the In one of her best-known and most ful incitement to voyeurism. ing responds to this disappearing act
Pre-Raphaelite circle too, as Barrin- disturbing poems, “Goblin Market” Rossetti herself, however, often with a delicate “filigree”—the word is
ger remarks in a passing tribute to the (1862), the temptation to see, hear, and seemed bent on resisting the pleasures his— of semi-abstract forms that swirl
wasted talents of Rossetti’s model and taste almost destroys a young woman, of the visible. The poem that later in- around two bodiless faces, one chastely
later wife, Elizabeth Siddall. who is only saved by her sister’s willing- spired Khnopff’s evocative images was applying his lips to the other’s cheek
The index for Victorian Radicals has ness to confront that same temptation composed only two years after “Goblin and both rendered in lines even more
no entry for Christina Rossetti, how- in her place. What the goblins are ped- Market,” but its renunciatory stance is finely drawn than the rest of the image.
ever, despite Gabriel’s having origi- dling is luscious fruit, and the domi- typical of the devotional writing that It’s a visual artist’s solution to an art in
nally invited his younger sister to join nant metaphor is hunger, but Rossetti’s would eventually dominate her work. which the Word finally trumps the lure
the literary club that would morph into incantatory language scarcely distin- Titled after a passage from Romans of images.
the PRB and his publishing several of guishes among the promised tastes, the (“O wretched man that I am! who
her poems— first anonymously and sound of the goblin cries, and the look shall deliver me from the body of this 2
Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writ-
then under a pseudonym—in three of of the fruits on offer: death?”), the poem both pleads for er’s Life (Viking, 1995), reviewed in
The Germ’s four issues. When not yet God’s help in bearing the “weight” of these pages by Fiona MacCarthy, No-
eighteen, she agreed to marry another Apples and quinces, the self and defiantly announces its de- vember 2, 1995.
Pre-Raphaelite painter, James Col- Lemons and oranges,
linson, though the engagement was Plump unpecked cherries,
broken off two years later, apparently Melons and raspberries,
on the grounds of religious difference.
(Unlike Christina, James was a Catho-
lic.) She also modeled for the Virgin
Bloom- down- cheeked peaches,
Swart- headed mulberries,
Wild free- born cranberries,
William
Hunter
Mary in two of Gabriel’s early canvases Crab- apples, dewberries,
and— more surprisingly—for the face Pine- apples, blackberries,
of Christ in Hunt’s much-reproduced Apricots, strawberries;—
picture The Light of the World (1851– All ripe together
1853), as well as the figure of a fallen In summer weather . . .
woman covering her face in shame in Come buy, come buy. and the
a pen-and-ink drawing by Gabriel. In
her early twenties, Christina herself The voluptuous intensity with which anatomy of
studied art, presumably with the hope “sweet-tooth” Laura eagerly devours
of teaching drawing at a day school she the goblin fruit—“She sucked and the modern
had recently opened with her mother. sucked and sucked the more/. . . She
Though that prospect never material- sucked until her lips were sore”—is museum
ized, she continued to produce small matched by that of the strange ritual
emblematic drawings for her own pur- with which her sister both replicates
poses, adding such “scratches,” as she and undoes this scenario of frenzied February 14–
called them, to both her manuscripts consumption. In order to save Laura,
and printed books. who is fading away from “baulked de- May 20, 2019
Several of the Pre-Raphaelites, in- sire,” Lizzie ventures to the market in
cluding Gabriel, provided images to her place, where she manages to resist
accompany her early poems; Hughes the goblins’ eroticized force-feeding,
painted two pictures inspired by her and returns, her body smeared with
work and went on to illustrate her “forbidden” fruit, to offer herself up to
books for children; Julia Margaret her sister:
Cameron and Charles Dodgson (bet-
ter known as Lewis Carroll) each in- Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices Allan Ramsay, William Hunter
(detail), 1764–65, oil on canvas
scribed a photograph with a quotation Squeezed from goblin fruits for The Hunterian, University of
from her verse. A few years before her you, Glasgow
death in 1894, the Belgian Symbol- Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
ist Fernand Khnopff borrowed her Eat me, drink me, love me;
free and open to the public
words to title two haunting images, Laura, make much of me.
Who Shall Deliver Me? and I Lock 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven
My Door Upon Myself; the latter Consuming the fruit in this fashion 1 877 BRIT ART | britishart.yale.edu
was exhibited in London and in turn proves at once poisonous and cura- @yalebritishart | #Hunter300
prompted Edward Hughes (nephew tive: though the juice is “wormwood
of Arthur) to substitute a brief quota- to her tongue,” and Laura nearly dies
tion from another of her poems for the of the experience, she awakes the next This exhibition has been organized by the
title of his own Christina-haunted pic- day restored to innocence. The poem Yale Center for British Art in partnership with
The Hunterian, University of Glasgow.
ture, “Oh what’s that in the hollow, so concludes with both sisters safely mar-
pale I quake to follow?”/“Oh that’s a ried, their encounter with “the wicked,
The following conversation between Soyinka: Because I saw what was hap- may be justified by circumstances—I phy of any ruler in the world. Some
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the Nobel pening. And many people do not know mean, if you are being attacked, for people thought he was cautious to the
Prize–winning Nigerian writer Wole how emotionally, not just historically instance. If you come and attack even point of timidity. I disagree entirely.
Soyinka took place in Cambridge, or intellectually, attached I am to our my so- called Nigeria for no reason at The proliferation of weapons of mass
Massachusetts, in November 2018. diaspora. all and the head of state does not take destruction makes it possible for a third
—The Editors appropriate action, I’ll be in the fore- world war to be started just like that.
Gates: To the African diaspora? front of those who want to throw him We’re living in a very volatile world
Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Wole, what’s out of office. And I believe that people that requires balance and caution.
your view of Donald Trump’s impact Soyinka: Yes, absolutely, the African in that kind of position where they He demonstrated it in that unbe-
on Africa, and how is he perceived in diaspora, whether in the United States, have to make difficult choices should lievable exploit of getting Osama bin
Africa? the Caribbean, or even Iraq, Laden. It takes a cool, prin-
Dominique Nabokov
where we’ve discovered the cipled, and committed leader
Wole Soyinka: Well, that is one hell of Zanj.1 One of the little-known to authorize that kind of op-
a question to begin with. Let me put it facts about me is I have a tiny, eration as a signal to the world
quite bluntly. He is considered a loose minuscule footnote in the de- that you don’t commit that
cannon that is discharging long-hidden segregation of America, which kind of atrocity without ex-
attitudes, racial attitudes, xenophobic is that I, personally, deseg- pecting repercussions. It took
attitudes. regated a swimming pool in courage. People made the
Atlanta during a conference argument that it was extraju-
Gates: Was there a cause and effect rela- there in the early 1960s. The dicial killing. I find that very
tion between the fact that a black man thrill of seeing a black man amusing. It was a global crime
occupied the White House for eight ascend to the highest position and Obama took action.
years and then his opposite was elected? in this slave- culture nation Simultaneously, however,
was for me as good as watch- Obama’s, shall we say, ecumen-
Soyinka: Trump came in on a platform ing the lift- off of a rocket into ism, his sense of commitment
of political, racial, and ideological ha- space. And so when I saw what to the equality of cultures,
tred for Obama. He was not even subtle looked like a reversal of the sometimes led him up the
about his mission of dismantling the gains of the black diaspora, I wrong path. His Cairo state-
legacy of this black man. became alarmed and despon- ment, for instance, I thought
dent. I saw it coming, and I was a disaster in terms of the
Gates: And unprecedented, in my ex- said, “If the Americans allow liberation of humanity—when
perience, to have a politician say, “My this to happen, this man spew- he spoke about his, not quite
prime focus is going to be on undoing ing divisive and racist rhetoric, approval, but endorsement
the policies of the man who preceded I’m going to reduce the status of the right of any culture to
me.” of my relationship to this na- force women to be veiled. That
tion.” So it was not saying I kind of speech made human-
Soyinka: It’s unusual. In Nigeria and was turning my back entirely ity a relative concept. For me,
other places, when you hear a presi- on the United States. It was a there’s one humanity or there
dent or a governor come in and start statement of how I felt. In ad- isn’t. No culture has a right
badmouthing the policies, attainments, dition to cutting up the card, I to degrade its womanhood.
or activities of his predecessor, usually went to the embassy. Even if you can do nothing
there’s only one purpose. You cancel about it, you at least must
that, you cancel this, you cancel that, Gates: You cut it up? never make a statement that
so you can start all over and make your Wole Soyinka, New York City, May 2011; supports any notion of cul-
own money. In other words, corruption Soyinka: It was difficult to photograph by Dominique Nabokov tural relativism, not when
is often at the bottom of it. [Laughter] tear. [Laughter] I didn’t know the dignity and fundamental
This is the first time I have seen an how to tear it. I cut it up. I carry it not be lumbered with an award called rights of humanity are involved.
iconoclastic approach, pure negativity around as a talisman, so that if ever I’m the Peace Prize. After he has left of- And Obama, I believe, carried too
on its own as a purpose, as an ideology denied entry into the United States I fice you can look at his entire record far his distancing from the black com-
of an incoming president. It’s like tell- will just say, “Okay, I know why you’re and see whether some policies were munity. I found that very troubling.
ing Americans, “You people have been doing it. You want souvenirs? I’ll give put in place or some actions were taken Until full racial equity is established—
sold a dummy. I’m the authentic Ameri- them a piece.” So I went to the embassy that furthered the process of peace. it won’t be in my lifetime, it probably
can and therefore I can do what I want.” because you have to formalize it as well. Because for me peace is not a trivial won’t be in yours—as a sort of unthink-
virtue. It’s something that the entire ing, casual way of social existence,
Gates: Is it accurate to say that Donald Gates: So you signed the repudiation. universe craves sooner or later. One there must always be some kind of no-
Trump’s a racist? You didn’t take it back? shouldn’t have to live up to a prize. A tice taken of the disadvantaged section
prize should be post facto. That’s the of society, whether we’re talking on
Soyinka: Oh, yes, I believe so. I know Soyinka: I will consider taking it back only reason I was against the award. gender lines or on racial lines. And I
that politicians can say or do anything, when you get rid of Trump. believe Obama turned his back on that
but at the same time, I find it totally Gates: How would you assess Obama’s kind of recognition.
diabolical that a dangerous weapon Gates: You’re a Nobel laureate. I re- legacy as president? I think those are the major issues I
like racism can be used to ascend to member many people were surprised— had with Obama. Otherwise, I thought
office. Political racism is divisive. It’s some elated, some shocked—when the Soyinka: From the way it affected me his was one of the most progressive ten-
used as a weapon deliberately to set committee gave Obama the Nobel personally when I was a green- card ures in the White House, and I think
one side against the other. Any head Peace Prize shortly after he was elected. holder, a permanent resident of this Americans have a right to lament their
of state, even a minor elected offi- What did you think about that? place, I can say thank goodness for choice in the last election. [Laughter]
cer, who can make statements about Obamacare at critical times for my
“shithole countries”— and actually Soyinka: I can tell you frankly that I family. So I know the value of that. I Gates: Every time I visit South Africa
name them!— and who says, “But on did not find it a positive gesture. Heads know its meaning for ordinary people. I’m shocked at the class divide. A small
the other hand, get me the blue- eyed of states find themselves sooner or later And for anyone to set about disman- class of black billionaires has arisen since
Norwegians. I don’t mind them com- compelled to take drastic action, some tling it, for me it amounts to a crime the end of apartheid. (Curiously, three
ing into the country.” [Laughter] How kind of action that cannot be consid- against humanity. of the country’s top ten richest men suf-
much more racist can you get? How ered in the nature of peace, but that On foreign policy, obviously Obama fered imprisonment under apartheid.)
close to the pernicious doctrine of the was firm when necessary. I remember Nevertheless, the class divide within
blue- eyed Aryan ideal of humanity? 1
A population of African slaves in his first declarations after he became the black community in South Africa is
what is now Iraq, who rebelled in 869. president: “We offer a hand of friend- huge. Do you see that changing?
Gates: You tore up your green card They carved out an independent state ship, but at the same time we are ready
when you heard that Trump had been for themselves and resisted reconquest with the fist of resistance.” I think that Soyinka: I believe it will evolve. Right
elected president. Why did you do that? until 883. spells out what should be the philoso- now, one views it with surprise for one
reason. The party that eventually came has become truly multiracial, as South and corrupt states. And this is what has do not. Either you have laws or you
to power, the ANC, has been part of Africa is rapidly becoming, must say been going on for so many years. do not. If you have laws and a group
the fabric of South African politics to the land monopolists, “Listen, we’re The cry today is, let’s decentralize. of people insist on flouting those laws,
and development from the beginning heading for another explosion. Let’s sit Let each state either stand on its feet, claiming that they are authorized by
of the black struggle— as a moral force, down and talk and really adopt a policy or else merge itself with other states. their scriptures to commit crimes, then
a political, ideological force. Definitely that requires sacrifice, that requires Give up a bloated bureaucracy. Give they’re not part of the general polity.
it was socialist. The Western powers, relinquishing certain material advan- up a bloated legislature that consumes The first response should have taken
of course, insisted it was communism, tages.” If that takes place, I think we in many cases over 50 percent of the place when the state of Zamfara decided
communism was coming to take over, will be able to see a faster improvement resources of each state. What kind of to adopt sharia law as the legal system.
etc. But socialism was the guiding prin- in the conditions of South Africa. a society is that, in which each leader We said, loudly, that this is against the
ciple of the ANC . is free to generate projects that are of constitution. The constitution does not
I frankly expected a far more radi- Gates: How does that compare with the no relevance whatever to the people? allow for a theocratic state. However,
cal transformation in South Africa. yawning class divide in Nigeria? They’re merely sources for taking as usual in these matters, the policy of
It hasn’t been as fast as one expected, the percentage off, creaming off, and appeasement was adopted by the then
and that is disappointing. Some of Soyinka: They are probably on the neglecting development completely, president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who
the factors can be traced to that mon- same level. The difference in Nigeria, barely paying salaries. Obviously, the was planning to perpetuate himself in
ster again, corruption, at the top. And of course, is that it’s not marked by race, system is not working. power. And we told him, “You have to
that’s really disheartening because we so it’s not really as apparently agoniz- take action.” But he was wooing those
were looking forward to pointing to ing as in the case of South Africa. We Gates: Help us to understand the role very sections for support in order to
South Africa as a model of fast reform, created— as in South Africa— a new of religious fundamentalism in Nigeria prolong his stay in office. And so im-
a greater egalitarian political con- class of millionaires from the military particularly, both Islamic and evangeli- punity reigned. One thing followed an-
sciousness after decades, centuries of ranks and their collaborators in civil cal Christian. other, both on major and minor scales.
oppression by a minority. And it’s just society. The oil wealth was just taken. Soyinka: It comes in various shapes, Human rights became a secondary
disastrous for us that this “revolution” That’s why each head of state wants to and people think it judicious to be thought, if any. All kinds of punish-
is unraveling before our eyes. be the minister of petroleum, because evenhanded, but when we’re dealing ment not in the constitution, in the law
We’re watching the change of power you have a mono- economy. All money in deaths by the hundreds, and some- statutes, were adopted, such as, for in-
from Jacob Zuma to Cyril Ramaphosa. comes from one source. And once times by the most horrendous means, stance, amputation for petty thieving.
I know Ramaphosa personally. As a you acquire the machinery to extract we have to be very blunt and frank. Yes, one instance did take place before
businessman before he became presi- it, which guarantees at least a certain There’s benign and negligible religious international pressure caused that gov-
dent, he took advantage of the con- level of employment, then you pro- fundamentalism and there’s malevo- ernment to put an end to it. But one at
certed effort to devolve commercial ceed to neglect the alternative, once- lent and vicious fundamentalism, and the very least had already been carried
power to the blacks. He benefited from indispensable sources of income. So it unfortunately, it is the Islamic religion out, and others were threatened at the
that; so did many, many others. It now becomes very critical for a president, or that is producing that really corrosive time.
remains to be seen whether he tries to somebody from the privileged classes and destructive kind of fundamental- You remember the notorious case
spread, shall we say, the luck of timing who gets into power, to sit on that, and ism. At least those who commit these of the woman who was to be stoned to
to the rest, especially the black impov- then treat it like a personal largess to crimes against humanity claim that death? You asked earlier, don’t I feel
erished majority. dispense at will rather than using it they are Muslims. And it’s not suf- sometimes that Nigeria doesn’t deserve
constructively for the overall transfor- ficient for the leaders, especially very to survive? I made up my mind that if
Gates: Where did South Africa go mation of society. It’s greed and it’s the belatedly, to keep saying, “This is not that sentence was carried out, I would
wrong? Was it under Mandela or was it lust for power. Because as long as you Islam.” We know that this is not Islam. tear up my passport. I could not con-
after Mandela passed the presidency to have the resources, those will guaran- The important thing, what is critical, is ceive of living in a nation, calling my-
Thabo Mbeki? tee loyalty. That’s what’s been retard- that it is the proponents of “authentic self a citizen of any nation that permits
ing the progress of Nigeria. Islam”—according to them—who are such cruelty, to bury a woman up to her
Soyinka: No, I don’t think that you committing these crimes against the neck and stone her head into mush. I
could for one moment attribute it to Gates: What do you see as the future community. At the beginning they were don’t care if it’s being done in Saudi
Mandela. The transfer of power—we’re of Nigeria? There have been times cossetted. They were mollycoddled. Arabia or Afghanistan.
talking about both economic and po- when you’ve wondered if Nigeria really The government bent over backward to So religious fundamentalism has
litical power—is always a very delicate should be a nation. ignore the excesses. Their own religious been allowed to take root. It could
problem, I think, in any society that’s leaders kept mute for quite a while, have been stopped. It could have been
just coming out of a particularly perni- Soyinka: Oh, yes, of course, invari- until they themselves became targets. put in its proper place. Religion is your
cious sociopolitical dispensation. South ably. We’re pursuing a centralized, an There were exceptions, I must always private business. You want to organize
Africa is not unique in that respect. We overcentralized system of governance, stress that. Thank goodness, there yourselves, to worship together? The
saw it in the Soviet Union. But the pace and yet we say that we are running an were, indeed, exceptions who from constitution permits it. If you want to
is slow. In South Africa the wealth al- “American form” of republicanism, of the very beginning screamed out loud, adopt a culture that does not impinge
most entirely belonged to a very small democracy, and so on. It’s just a distor- “This is not us. This is not our religion. on the rights of others, a culture that
minority. That transitional process now tion. So in Nigeria today you hear the These people are renegades. They’re is dictated by a religion, I don’t think
is the problem. word restructure, restructure, restruc- psychopaths. We want nothing to do anybody will interfere. You want to veil
I have seen efforts, for instance, to ture. Allow the states to create their with them.” But for political reasons yourself from top to toe? I might find it
tackle the issue of housing, to move own wealth and utilize that wealth the government refused to take this mi- revolting to look at, but I’m not going to
people away from the old shanties to along the lines of their priorities, which nority seriously until recent times, until tear off your hijab. But you cannot flout
decent, dignified, low- cost housing, differ from state to state. But if all we had shameful, shameful episodes the constitution in a way that imposes
and these are positive moves. The own- the resources are going to the center like the abduction of the schoolgirls on other sections of the community, you
ership of land is an issue to be handled and then the center doles out the very who were taken into the forest and kept cannot impose on others a mandatory
with the greatest sensitivity, but at the minimum it has to by the constitution for years, traumatized, dehumanized. observance of your religious laws.
same time resolved soon. There may (which itself requires changing), then it One atrocity after another.
come a time when a government, es- can use the rest of the resources in its Ultimately, it’s an issue of impunity. Gates: Paul Kagame, the president of
pecially if it’s strongly in power and hands to prop up useless, unproductive, Either you have a constitution or you Rwanda, is often praised throughout
the United States, particularly by in which an alternative voice is given. And they decided that they were going all. Even if you’re going to do that, you
philanthropists. What’s your take on So when we talk about the role of the to start concentrating on the education should proceed as you do normally for
Kagame and Rwanda? activist today and the writer, it’s not of their women, and that the men for literature. You want to take the lyrics
an innovation. In Africa and so- called a change should tackle the economic out of the music and say this is litera-
Soyinka: Kagame’s government is be- developing countries, it is dishonestly fortunes of the Igbo. They were to go ture also, in spite of its being in the mu-
ginning to slip into the contradictions posited as some Western notion. I find out and trade and do business, to raise sical mode? Then you must apply the
that he sought so valiantly at the begin- that not just blasphemous but crimi- funds for this economic resurgence, same stringent standards, and I do not
ning to eliminate. I’m still very posi- nally blasphemous. So nothing for me and their women must go to school; believe that those standards were ap-
tive on Kagame and his government. I has changed. We’re merely using new in other words, reverse the traditional plied. I look at the list of poets who’ve
believe he has achieved much for that instruments. We’re using cartoons, position. been nominated in the past. I compare
nation, considering its history and the which are a prominent feature in many Now this was told to me confidentially their work with the lyrics of Bob Dylan,
truly dismal sociopolitical reality that societies. We’re using plays, sketches, by a very reliable Igbo. The women who and it is ridiculous.
he inherited. Allowing for the enormity guerrilla theater, living theater. And traditionally had occupied the lower
of the crime that nation committed music of course. rungs of society—they suddenly felt Gates: You’ve been coming to the
against itself— give it its proper name, It’s a continuum. I always like to energized intellectually, creatively. United States for almost sixty years.
genocide—I give Kagame a hefty pass. stress that; nothing innovative is really This, I suspect, in turn then created Do you experience racism here?
But I believe also that it has a human happening. It’s just that we now have emulation among that generation of
rights record that requires very serious a means of communication that high- women in Nigeria, especially in the Soyinka: I’m largely protected. People
attention. He needs to revamp his gov- lights the plight of writers who are in our position, I think we’re largely
had both the defendants and, more im- lum crimen, nulla poena sine lege). took the report’s argument to its final the historiographical literature, so
portant, the incriminating documents Positivism, the dominant legal doctrine conclusion: the Treaty of Versailles readers will not learn from his book
in hand. of the nineteenth century, demanded should make new law based on the re- how historians have interpreted the ne-
Treaty violation was enormously more: “without previously written law.” quirements of the international com- gotiations and effects of the Versailles
important to statesmen in 1919, yet Because nullum crimen protects the munity. “Civilization,” he argued, “is Treaty. He is also agnostic about the
their concern had less of an impact on rights of defendants against arbitrary the organization of human responsi- facts (did Germany wage an aggres-
future international law on that legal state overreach, it is the fundamental bilities . . . . We now have the perfect sive war?) and seemingly even about
issue than on any other. Schabas’s ac- tenet of legality. Nowadays, after de- opportunity to take the principle of whether aggressive war violated in-
count does not make clear why. After cades of codification of international responsibility, which is at the basis of ternational law (even if it was not a
all, Imperial Germany’s breach of the law, its strictures can more easily be national law, and transpose it into in- “crime” in the domestic sense).*
1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgian neu- met. But in 1919 not even the laws of ternational law.” The treaty writers, Nevertheless, Schabas agrees with
trality caused Britain to enter the war. war contained specific sentences or he said, “will share in the glory of much recent historiography that has
That treaty was signed by all the major named courts to handle the offenses something unprecedented—I readily positively reevaluated the enduring
powers of Europe, acting as guaran- listed in the Hague Convention of 1899. acknowledge—by establishing inter- importance of Versailles, despite its
tors, and was designed to prevent any It was therefore possible in 1919 for a national justice,” which until now had immediate failure to prosecute public
one of them from attaining continen- person acting in an official capacity to “existed only in books. Finally, we will officials. He writes that “with the ex-
tal hegemony by expanding at the ex- violate international law, yet not to have make it a reality.” Orlando embraced ception of the Charter of the United
pense of weaker, strategically located committed a “crime” in the positivist Clemenceau’s views “because they Nations, the Treaty of Versailles . . .was
states such as Belgium. It was there- sense endorsed by Lansing. If such a raise us above the legal technicalities. the most important international con-
fore the major diplomatic and legal person—say, the kaiser—were put on vention of the twentieth century.” The
Bettmann/Getty Images
security instrument of the nineteenth trial, then he would be tried ex post treaty gave legal recognition to the new
century. facto. This was the central American state borders of Europe, and it set down
Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had complaint regarding all the legal issues, broad rules governing international
admitted publicly on August 4, 1914, whether of aggressive war, treaty vio- state conduct, both in the reasons it
that Germany’s invasion of Belgium lation, immunity for heads of state, or gave for its treatment of the defeated
violated treaty law. The British attor- the international tribunal: they would Central Powers and in the Covenant of
ney general called the matter “an ab- all operate “retroactively,” as Wilson the League of Nations.
solutely clear issue,” and said that if complained to Lloyd George. Its painstakingly documented list of
Germany had won the war, “public law Fulfilling the nullum crimen standard thirty-two separate war crimes consti-
and the sanctity of treaties would have of legality was extremely difficult for tuted “one of the most enduring con-
disappeared in our day and our gen- international law in 1919, for only one tributions . . . to the development of the
eration from the world.” What sort of of its sources (treaties or conventions) laws and customs of war.” It specified
law could exist, if treaties meant noth- was in fact written. The main source, crimes against civilians (ranging from
ing? Even Imperial Germany had con- customary international law (CIL), was murder and torture to rape, deporta-
templated trying Romania’s king for not; it derived from consistent state tion, and forced labor), against prison-
breaking its treaty of alliance with the practice understood by statesmen and ers of war and wounded soldiers, and
Central Powers in 1916. The Nurem- diplomats as obligatory. CIL was very against civilian and cultural property,
berg Charter followed the same logic, like the common law with its pragmatic, and it criminalized methods of com-
listing twenty-six treaties violated by but unwritten, development through bat such as poison gas, exploding bul-
David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau,
Nazi Germany. But international crim- time. It was thus easiest for Great Brit- lets, giving no quarter, collective fines,
and Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace
inal law has not developed along these ain, a common law state, to argue the Conference, circa 1919
sinking merchant and passenger ships
lines. The Rome Statute (1998) of the second position: regardless of the lack without warning, and destruction of
International Criminal Court (ICC) of written law or an already- existing hospitals and hospital ships. An ICC
does not list treaty violations among tribunal, the case was “justiciable by It is history that is taking place. It is judge has credited the treaty with tak-
the core international crimes. the settled opinion of these fourteen, no longer law. If we consult the codes, ing “the first step towards the devel-
fifteen or sixteen States which are now we will have great difficulty in finding opment of a customary international
engaged at the Peace Conference”; “it there what we seek.” law norm that rejects . . . immunity” for
The most enduring legal dilemma was is right we should bring to trial those state officials.
aggressive war. The ICC did not receive who are responsible for such uncon- Schabas notes of the Council of Four
final jurisdiction over that crime until scionable breaches of the principles of Nevertheless, the United States that “never before, or after, have the
July 2018. The problem was defining humanity,” as Solicitor General Ernest stood firm. The pattern was always leaders of the world’s most powerful
“aggression,” a process that stretched Pollock reasoned. It is remarkable that the same: Britain, France, and other nations devoted so much time to a de-
from 1947 to 2010, when nations finally Britain’s representatives did not make powers argued for criminal trials; the bate about criminal law and individual
agreed that aggression was “the use of the stronger arguments based on state United States refused; the other pow- responsibility.” He chides them, rightly,
armed force by a State against the sov- practice since the Congress of Vienna, ers weakened (often for practical, not for their “amateurishness” regarding
ereignty, territorial integrity or politi- which—with the exception of the wars legal reasons) and finally gave in. Wil- important legal questions. But although
cal independence of another State, or of Italian and German unification, rec- son arranged a “compromise” that pro- three of them were lawyers, all were first
in any other manner inconsistent with ognized as just under the principle of duced the odd wording of Article 227, and foremost political leaders trying, in
the Charter of the United Nations,” self-determination—had avoided all which “publicly arraign[ed] William Wilson’s words, “to create the principle
and that persons in political authority Great Power conflicts on the European II of Hohenzollern, formerly German and the penalty” that would safeguard
could be tried for it. continent since 1815, and on the strong Emperor, for a supreme offence against a new world order based on law. To get
In stark contrast to the post–World expectation of international mediation international morality and the sanctity there, they had to take a leap out of pos-
War II era, no one in 1919 was con- by the Concert of Europe. Perhaps of treaties”—morality, not law. The itivism—a leap that Wilson, for all his
cerned with the definition of aggres- they found their interpretation too ob- Allied reply to Germany’s law-laden idealism, refused to venture. The kaiser
sive war. Everyone knew it when they viously true. rejoinder, which found Article 227 de- remained safe in Huis Doorn, the man-
saw it, and all, including Wilson, were The French argued the third posi- void of “any legal basis,” denied that sion he purchased near the Dutch city
convinced that Germany had launched tion. The report commissioned by Cle- the treaty had a “juridical character of Utrecht, until his death in 1941, when
one. Moreover, everyone described menceau struck out into new territory. as regards its substance, but only [did the sequel to World War I was prepar-
it as a “crime.” But they disagreed on It declared, “A new international law so] in its form.” That is, the treaty had ing the way for another American,
how to define a crime in international has been born” out of the facts of the poured politics into legal form. Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief
law; that was the heart of the matter, war and had been “anticipated in in- Even so, the Netherlands, where the prosecutor for the US at Nuremberg, to
and it is the basic question posed in ternational custom.” It reminded read- Kaiser had fled after Germany’s col- take that leap.
Schabas’s book. There were essentially ers of just war theory, “too forgotten lapse in November 1918, rejected Al-
three positions. today . . .which did not hesitate to pun- lied requests for his extradition on the
The first was Lansing’s rigid positiv- ish most harshly the makers of unjust ground that Article 227 violated the
ism, based firmly on domestic law. He wars.” It noted that Kaiser Wilhelm rule against retroactive punishment. A *That last view was the fourth posi-
cited a US Supreme Court opinion of had seized every opportunity to brag quixotic attempt by several rogue US tion on aggressive war, one famously
1812 that for a crime to exist, a legisla- about his own power, and even quoted officers to kidnap him netted only a taken by Erich Kaufmann in 1911. He
ture had first to make “an act a crime, some of his more notorious speeches. stolen ashtray embossed with the royal wrote that “the development of power
affix a punishment to it, and declare The report argued that nullum crimen coat of arms “adorned with a pipe- is the essence of the state,” and only
the court that shall have jurisdiction of was appropriate for domestic law but smoking dog that bore the monogram war could prove and instantiate that es-
the offence.” For Lansing, “what is true must bend for large political crimes, ‘W. I.,’ presumably meaning ‘Wilhelm sence. Therefore, “in its highest formal
appearance, might and right must coin-
of the American States must be true of “in order to adapt to the exceptional Imperator.’” No international trial of
cide,” meaning that successful aggres-
this looser union which we call the So- circumstances of public law.” the kaiser was ever held. sive war actually created law; it did not
ciety of Nations.” Clemenceau, the only nonlawyer Schabas has done meticulous re- violate it. See Kaufmann, Das Wesen
The classic view of criminal law since among his fellow statesmen at the search among the unpublished archival des Völkerrechts und die clausula rebus
at least the eighteenth century was “no Council of Four (which also included records of this titanic legal struggle. sic stantibus (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
crime, no penalty, without law” (nul- Wilson, Orlando, and Lloyd George), Unfortunately he does not reference 1911), pp. 135, 146, 153.
they comfort zone and you takin’ jobs I doubt it. Despite her insistence that But in Todd-Breland’s telling, the
from teachers.” racism isn’t a question of belief, her ar- neoliberal reform tradition has always
Other students said that “the schools gument that the school closings were stood in tension with what she calls
were closed because we’re black and racist ultimately rests on the beliefs of “Black self-determination.” As the in-
we were failing all our tests,” as their African-Americans on the South Side tegrationist dream stumbled in the late
teacher told Ewing; in the era of high- of Chicago. The people she interviews 1960s, African-Americans in Chicago
stakes testing, Chicago’s children obvi- think that the school closings were sought to develop their own educa-
ously know about their low academic racist, and we should listen closely to tional institutions. Some created pri-
performance and its consequences for them. But we condescend to them when vate schools, often with Pan-African
their schools. But to most of the people we place their beliefs beyond critique, themes; others worked with neighbor-
whom Ewing quotes, this isn’t really as if the victims of Chicago’s wrongful hood organizations to develop public
a question of academics at all. In the educational history can never be wrong schools under “community control,”
book’s most chilling remark, a for- themselves. which aimed to wrest power from the
mer principal likens school closings to mostly white bureaucrats who sat atop
slave auctions. “I’m, like, begging you the city school system. Buoyed by cre-
to keep my family together,” she told I n A Political Education, Elizabeth ative leaders and strong parent net-
a hearing, between sobs. “Don’t take Todd-Breland recounts that educational works, some of the schools flourished;
them and separate them.” history in vivid detail, starting with the others wilted and died.
Ewing discounts the “quantitative re- 1963 school boycott. African-American Still others reorganized themselves
ality” put forth by Emanuel and other students and teachers staged several as charter schools in the 1990s, which
reformers. She instead en- raises a challenge for Todd-
Dawoud Bey
dorses community critics who Breland’s interpretation: How
pointed to “another reality” could a school with roots in
to explain why their schools the black tradition of self-
were closed: racism. But she determination that she ad-
isn’t shy about invoking her mires embrace the neoliberal
own quantitative statistics in reform that she rejects? Part of
the case against school clos- the answer lay in the resources
ings: for example, she notes that taxpayer-supported char-
that test scores plummeted ters promised; if charters were
in schools after districts an- “the game in town,” one cash-
nounced plans to close them, strapped black school leader
and that students’ scores reasoned, “then we need to
didn’t rise when they relo- get a piece of the action.” But
cated afterward. the price has been a dilution
Ewing is deeply attuned to of black self- determination,
differences across races in Todd-Breland argues, which
Chicago, but she’s much less has been “co- opted” by neo-
concerned with differences liberalism and “repurposed”
within them, and she doesn’t Dawoud Bey: Theresa, South Shore High School, Chicago, IL, 2003; in the language of individual
seriously examine diverse from Bey’s ‘Class Pictures’ series. The photograph appears achievement rather than col-
perceptions about schools in his new book, Seeing Deeply, published by lective racial uplift. She con-
within the black community. University of Texas Press. cludes her book with a ringing
For example, national surveys call to rediscover the older
reveal strong support among African- more citywide boycotts after that, fo- radical spirit, which can reconnect
Americans for charter schools. But cused especially on overcrowding in African-Americans to their communi-
Ewing presents blacks in South Chi- all-black schools. Rather than allow- ties and reshape their schools around
cago as heavily opposed to charters, ing black children to attend whites- black pride and purpose.
which suggests a bias in her sample of only schools, which were much less Todd-Breland finds the radical spirit
informants. She also tends to take her cramped, school superintendent Ben- alive and well in the 2012 teachers’ strike
subjects’ observations about racism at jamin Willis relocated thousands of as well as in the 2013 protests against
face value. Everyone who perceives African-Americans to portable class- Emanuel’s school closings. She also sees
racism is assumed to be a victim of it, room trailers. These “Willis Wagons” traces of it in the national Movement
no matter what other forces are in play. became a symbol of racial inequality in for Black Lives, which demanded a
And everyone charged with racism is Chicago and a spur for black demands moratorium on charter schools in 2016.
viewed as a perpetrator of it. Leaders for school integration, which African- But Todd-Breland fails to note that the
atop the Chicago school system “don’t Americans said would relieve over- same demand led to the defection of
care about African American commu- crowding and give their children access several prominent Black Lives leaders,
nities,” parents tell Ewing. “They don’t to the better educational resources that who believed that charters could em-
care if we get an education.” whites commanded. But resistance in power black parents and communities.
Did Chicago school officials— white neighborhoods—and, eventually, “I think it’s our job as education re-
including African-American ones— white flight to the suburbs—killed that formers, as people who are fighting for
really regard black communities with dream a few short years after it began. educational justice, to engage the com-
such disdain? Ewing says that’s the Then came school reform, which munity, to engage our parents and to
wrong question, because racism isn’t Todd-Breland casts as a product less of make sure they have the best informa-
a matter of belief at all. It’s a system racism than of neoliberalism. This term tion,” declared Rashad Anthony Turner,
of power, designed to maintain the has become something of a cliché in who stepped down from his Black Lives
oppression and subjugation of black progressive political circles, signifying leadership position in Minnesota after
people. She compares it to a merry-go- everything from free-market capital- the organization’s charter moratorium.
round, which determines the position ism to government austerity.2 In Todd- “Because I don’t believe that any parent
of each horse no matter who rides it. It’s Breland’s book, it connotes “policies on the face of this Earth would say that
a strangely robotic and bloodless meta- premised on market-based principles they shouldn’t be in control, or be able to
phor, especially for a book that pays of competition, privatization, charter choose, where their child goes to school.”
such careful attention to individual ex- school expansion, and a reliance on The alternative, he said, was to make
periences. Drawing upon community standardized testing.” To her credit, students “continue to suffer” in their cur-
hearings and extensive personal inter- she acknowledges that the neoliberal rent neighborhood schools, where “you
views, Ewing repeatedly demonstrates project drew bipartisan as well as might be one of the 70 percent of kids
how her subjects perceived school clos- multiracial support: in Obama’s first who can’t read at the end of third grade.”3
ings as racist; but at the same time, she year in the White House, for example,
insists that racism isn’t a question of his administration engaged the strange
perception but rather of unequal out- bedfellows Al Sharpton and Newt Gin- D espite their insistence on the impor-
comes: school closings disproportion- grich to campaign together on behalf of tance of listening to black voices, Ewing
ately affect black students and inhibit his Race to the Top initiative.
their learning. So, if another scholar
were to show that students’ test scores 3
Beth Hawkins, “In-Depth: Black
rose after their schools closed, would 2
See Daniel Rodgers, “The Uses and Lives Matter’s Rashad Turner on Why
Ewing temper her claim about the rac- Abuses of ‘Neoliberalism,’” Dissent, He’s Quitting Over Charter School At-
ism of the policy? Winter 2018. tacks,” The 74, September 18, 2016.
and Todd-Breland don’t pay much at- As Duncan proudly notes, his efforts public schools. That’s hardly the last teachers won an immediate seven-
tention to voices like Rashad Turner’s. to reward successful schools—and to word on a subject that continues to gen- student reduction in high school math
For pro- charter views you need to con- close lower-performing ones—led to erate new research and debate. But it’s and English classes beginning next
sult Arne Duncan’s recent memoir, higher graduation rates and remark- disingenuous for Todd-Breland, Dun- year. But in a city where some classes
How Schools Work, which traces his able test-score gains: by 2018, Chi- can, or Ewing to pretend that the re- have as many as forty-six students, it’s
rise from Chicago’s South Side to being cago schoolchildren between third search speaks with a single voice, when unlikely that reducing class size by a
the head of the city’s public school sys- and eighth grade were improving at a they know full well that it does not. few students will improve learning. In
tem and ultimately secretary of educa- faster rate than students in 96 percent We live in a cynical age. And it’s the a landmark study in Tennessee in the
tion in the Obama administration, from of American schools. Yet nearly three height of cynicism to imagine that your 1980s, researchers demonstrated that
2009 to 2015. Duncan—a cheerful and fourths of eighth graders in the city side is defending “the kids” while the students in classes of between thir-
unrepentant champion of school re- still aren’t proficient in math and read- other side is deliberately neglecting teen and seventeen children scored
form—grew up just a few blocks from ing, according to the National Assess- them. The basic faith of liberal democ- significantly better on standardized
some of the closed schools described by ment of Educational Progress: despite racy is that equally informed people tests—and were more likely to go to
Ewing. As he readily admits, he came their accelerated rates of improvement, can reason from the same set of facts college—than students in classes of
from a much more privileged back- many children start so far behind that to different conclusions. But in the twenty-two to twenty-six. Many Los
ground than most of Ewing’s subjects: they can’t catch up. Meanwhile, Dun- uncivil war over schools—which, it’s Angeles classes are already much bigger
his father taught at the University of can never mentions the large body of worth restating, are supposed to teach than that, of course, and bringing them
Chicago, where Duncan attended the research suggesting that test-based in- future citizens that liberal faith—we down to a level that actually enhances
university’s elite (and mostly white) centives don’t enhance student learn- seem to have abandoned it. If you want learning would require a huge—and, at
Laboratory School. But he routinely ing in the long run. Most prominently, to test minority students and hold their present, unimaginable—redistribution
interacted with African-Americans, a rigorous 2011 study by the National schools accountable, you risk being of resources. In that light, debates over
either by playing basketball on local Academy of Sciences—examining na- called a racist who seeks to keep them charter schools and merit pay sound a
courts (Duncan eventually played pro tionwide data over nine years—found mired in oppression; if you oppose bit like moving chairs around on the
ball in Australia) or by tutoring at a little consistent effect of standardized such measures and want to keep your deck of the Titanic. Until we’re willing
South Side children’s center run by his testing upon academic achievement. neighborhood school open, you may be to make large and sustained public in-
mother, where Duncan learned about You’d think that a guy who is so denounced as a union shill who puts vestments in poor urban communities,
the low- quality education provided by wedded to data—a recurring theme in adult interests ahead of the kids. But most of their public schools will con-
many of the city’s public schools. Duncan’s book—would at least men- how will our children learn to deliber- tinue to languish.
When Duncan took over as schools tion this study. But in the battle over ate their differences in a civil manner if When Barack Obama appointed
chief in Chicago in 2001, just half of en- school reform, every side invokes re- the adults in the room can’t, or won’t? Arne Duncan education secretary, he
tering ninth-graders in the city gradu- search that buttresses its viewpoint and The problem here isn’t neoliberalism; instructed him to move ahead aggres-
ated high school; only a quarter of downplays research that doesn’t. Near it’s illiberalism, which imagines every sively on merit pay, charter schools, and
those graduates were ready for college; the end of her own book, Todd-Breland political opponent as a mortal threat to Common Core. But he also cautioned
and only half of those ready for college states flatly that charter school students the nation. And it permeates the entire against alienating his opponents, espe-
would complete it. So of one hundred “have not consistently performed over- debate over our schools, belying their cially those in his own party. “Just don’t
high school freshmen, six were likely whelmingly better than students in democratic premise and purpose. poke the unions in the eye with this,”
to graduate from college; among black traditional public schools.” But a 2015 Nor is it clear whether victory for Obama warned. “Let’s engage, not at-
and Latino freshmen, only three would Stanford study found that black stu- either side would make a substantial tack.” He might have been wrong about
do so. Nationwide, the news was simi- dents in charter schools gained the test- difference in the lives of America’s school reform, as Eve Ewing and Eliza-
larly dismal: half of black and Latino score equivalent of thirty-six extra days poorest children, who need much more beth Todd-Breland suggest, but he was
students graduated from high school, of math learning and twenty-six extra assistance than our political system is right about democracy. We could do
and between a half and a third of those days of reading per year, compared to willing to give them. In the recent Los worse than to listen to him, especially
graduates were ready for college. peers of similar background in regular Angeles school strike, for example, right now.
Cloth: 978-0-8179-2244-3
Ebook available
hooverpress.org
reality he was merely, though humiliat- And of course, when he’s released something horribly immoral is taking nesses included a seventeen-year-old
ingly enough, ejected from hotels at the and leaves (too late) for exile, we want place, because there are surely women servant in the house in Oxford where
demand of English tourists. In another to shout: Don’t go back to Bosie! Con- lurking somewhere. When assured that Douglas had rooms, who said that
unlikely scene he sings for his supper, stance and his few remaining loyal there are no women anywhere on the Wilde had kissed him and “placed his
or the price of his drinks, in a rowdy friends prayed he wouldn’t do so; but, premises, she breaks into sobs of relief penis between my legs and satisfied
café (Béatrice Dalle as the patronne), after the seaside sojourn with Ross and and blesses them all. This seems amus- himself.” Another was sixteen when
with Everett playing a thoroughly di- Turner, the next episode in The Happy ing enough, but here we encounter Wilde met him in Worthing and mas-
shevelled and decayed Wilde. The orig- Prince is all too true to life. Wilde something more troubling. turbated him and “used his mouth” on
inal conceit has him telling the story of takes the train to Rouen, where he’s At his first trial as a defendant, him. And a chambermaid at the Savoy
The Happy Prince to boys in a Parisian reunited with Douglas, that “vicious, Wilde gave an impassioned spontane- Hotel said that she had found Wilde
hovel, then flashing back to his home in gold-digging, snobbish, anti-Semitic, ous speech, which brought tears and in a bedroom with a boy of about
London, where he would tell the same untalented little horror for whom no cheers, about “the ‘Love that dare not fourteen.
story to his young sons. good word can be said,” in Auden’s no- speak its name,’. . . such a great affec- Not long before his death, Wilde
Watching tripe like Downton Abbey nonsense description. They then make tion . . . as there was between David and somewhat unconvincingly told a re-
is only made endurable by totting up their way to Naples, and a bacchanal. Jonathan . . . as pure as it is perfect.” porter from the Daily Chronicle,
the solecisms and anachronisms, even By contrast with the earlier movies, That was far from defending the physi- “Much of my moral obliquity is due
if this amusement soon palls. Everett’s which treated Douglas in a fairly neu- cal love of men with men. Wilde had to the fact that my father would not
screenplay has enough of those, from tral way, plays like David Hare’s The brought the fatal action not to affirm allow me to become a Catholic. There
Ross telling Wilde that he’s a “profes- Judas Kiss and movies like Wilde, and but to deny that he was a “Somdomite,” is an artistic side to the church, and the
sional masochist” to Douglas as Queensberry quaintly put fragrance of its teaching would have
telling him that his father was Oscar Wilde it, before he perjured him- curbed my degeneracies.” He was in
a “groper.” This alludes to self at length. And although fact received into the Roman Catholic
Sir William Wilde’s reputa- Wilde has long been ac- Church on his deathbed, as shown in
tion in Dublin for molesting claimed as a gay martyr and the movie.
women, the subject of an- hero, he needs to be treated Today that church is shaken to its
other famous libel action. 3 with care. foundations by appalling scandals of
And yet that word would not priestly child abuse, with a recent dra-
have been used in the 1890s. matic outcome in the defrocking of an
Nor would Wilde have said, Between the first night American cardinal. Rupert Everett
when Douglas complains that of The Importance and the should know. He was brought up as a
he has to pay an Italian boy first day in court on April 3, Catholic and educated at Ampleforth,
for sex, “the only one who Wilde and Douglas escaped the Benedictine monastery and board-
ever fucked you for fun was from the English winter to ing school in Yorkshire. A recent re-
me.” One sometimes has the Algiers and, as Sturgis says, port cataloged a hair-raising story of
impression of later admirers “light, lassitude and sexual abuse of boys there over forty years.
projecting their own experi- licence.” Douglas pursued “a Several clerical and lay teachers have
ence and language back onto beautiful ‘sugar-lipped’ four- been convicted, and two monks have
Wilde. teen-year-old,” and Wilde gone to prison.
wrote to Ross, “There is Since Wilde’s day, we have grown
great beauty here. The Kab- mercifully far more tolerant of most
W e get a very different yle boys are quite lovely.” sexual variety—but not pedophilia.
view from Sturgis’s book. Even the beggars were at- One London reviewer of Sturgis’s book
Although sometimes a little tractive, “so the problem of said that “if these and all the others
flat considering the high poverty is easily solved.” The had been young women rather than
drama it describes, it’s word to note is “poverty.” young men, Wilde would today be seen
thorough and informative. Like many another before or not as an icon, but as a predator.” But
He decries rather too loudly since, straight or gay, Wilde shouldn’t we see him as a predator any-
the deficiencies of Richard and Douglas were sexual way? We may be dismayed by Wilde’s
Ellmann’s 1987 life, which tourists, and, while we look sufferings in prison, but a hundred
has been shown to contain back in horror at the histori- years later he would likely have re-
numerous errors, although cal persecution of gay men, ceived a longer sentence. Some years
Sturgis leans heavily on his predeces- now Everett’s, have taken to portray- we should be cautious about adopting ago a well-known figure in the London
sor at many points, to the extent that ing him as possibly even more horrible a new double standard, and judging pop music business was convicted of
some passages in the two books are re- than he actually was. Here played by more leniently a writer who bought the offenses with boys of fourteen and fif-
markably similar. But he does provide Colin Morgan, Douglas behaves vilely bodies of penniless young boys in late- teen, and sentenced to seven years.
new detail and provoke new thoughts. at every moment, insulting Wilde as a nineteenth-century Algiers or Naples Just as Wilde remained a gay hero,
Throughout Wilde’s story the reader silly snob (true enough), missing no op- than we would a businessman who buys the Labouchere amendment remained
or viewer often wants to shout like a portunity to humiliate him, and then, the bodies of penniless young girls in a byword for injustice. And yet the law
child at a pantomime: Don’t do it Oscar! at the end, making a hysterical scene at early-twenty-first-century Bangkok or to which it was appended, the 1885
Don’t fall for the frightful Bosie, don’t his graveside, where he tells Ross that Manila. Criminal Law Amendment Act, was in
get embroiled in a squalid vendetta Oscar never loved him “as he did me.” Woven or adapted into Everett’s its main purpose wholly commendable.
inside a horrible family, don’t rise to While Wilde wrote Ross somewhat screenplay are some of Wilde’s own It was largely the work of one man,
Queensberry’s bait, don’t bring the di- grandiosely that “my going back to lines from his letters in exile: “Like the muckraking journalist W.T. Stead.
sastrous action, and, when it collapses, Bosie was psychologically inevitable,” dear St Francis of Assisi I am wedded He had researched and published a
for heaven’s sake go abroad. That was he added with what may have been to Poverty: but in my case the marriage melodramatic series of articles on the
what his poor wife Constance wanted, a kind of insight, “Of course I shall is not a success,” or “How evil it is to “Maiden tribute of modern Babylon,”
and what his friends Frank Harris and often be unhappy, but I still love him: buy Love, and how evil to sell it! And exposing the extent of child prostitu-
George Bernard Shaw urged him to do; the mere fact that he wrecked my life yet what purple hours one can snatch.” tion in London, and the act was in-
that was what many people, including makes me love him.” In the four years Everett has him saying a version of this tended to suppress that evil. Wouldn’t
Carson, hoped he would be given the they were together before the disas- to a lad who is getting dressed as Wilde most of us admire that, and the aim of
opportunity to do. After the Queens- ter, Douglas may be reckoned Wilde’s pays him off. Again, in April 1899, he protecting young girls—or boys—then
berry case had incriminated Wilde muse, along with the stimulation Wilde wrote, “I am going to try and find a or now?
himself, the warrant for his arrest was received from “feasting with panthers,” place near Genoa where I can live for Great artists, the late musicologist
delayed to give him time to catch a their folie à deux in the gay under- ten francs a day (boy compris).” The Hans Keller once said, have always
train to the Channel ports and escape world; it was in those few short years word to note is “boy.” been less and done more than the pub-
to France, but he sat fatalistically at the that Wilde wrote all his best work. But One of the witnesses against Wilde lic wishes to believe. Wilde in some
Cadogan Hotel awaiting arrest. Ever the their time in exile brought no renewal, said that he had “committed the act of ways may be an exception, since he did
performer, or the self-dramatist, he told just the wasting away of what was left of sodomy with me.” Sodomy had been a treat his life as a dramatic performance.
Douglas, “I decided it was nobler and Wilde’s life and talent. capital offense for which, barbarous as And yet however gaudy and extraordi-
more beautiful to stay. I did not want to Part of The Happy Prince takes place it now seems, men were still hanged in nary that life was, we honor him more
be called a coward or a deserter.” in Naples (though not filmed there: Ev- public in London less than twenty years by remembering not the man but his
erett has given a droll account of how, before Wilde was born.4 But other wit- work, and above all what Auden called
for financial reasons, it was mostly shot his “one imperishable masterpiece,” fe-
3
See Colm Tóibín, Mad, Bad, Danger- in Germany and Belgium). Douglas licitously adding that The Importance
ous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, picks up a pretty young waiter, and 4
See A. D. Harvey, “Prosecutions for of Being Earnest, in Wilde’s own sub-
Yeats and Joyce (Scribner 2018), re- then there’s a semi-orgy with a gang Sodomy in England at the Beginning of title “a trivial comedy for serious peo-
viewed in these pages by Clair Wills, of youths. The waiter’s mother arrives the Nineteenth Century,” The Histori- ple,” was “the only purely verbal opera
December 20, 2018. screaming with rage that she knows cal Journal, December 1978. in English.”
by virtue of our status as rational be- It is here that Korsgaard parts com- gaard turns to a further problem: “Na- for somewhat different but equally rad-
ings. As Korsgaard puts it: pany with him. She distinguishes two ture,” she says, “is recalcitrant to moral ical conclusions about how we should
senses in which someone can be a mem- standards.” Not only are the other ani- treat animals.
Because of the way in which we are ber of the moral community, an active mals not subject to the moral law; their The first ground would be a rejection
conscious of the motives for our and a passive sense. To be a member in interests are irreconcilably opposed in of the crucial idea of absolute value,
actions, we cannot act without en- the active sense is to be one of the com- a way that makes impossible the kind either as a moral starting point or as
dorsing those motives as adequate munity of reciprocal lawgivers who is of moral harmony that we can aspire to the conclusion of a Kantian moral ar-
to justify what we propose to do. But obligated to obey the moral law. To be as an ideal for the human world. What gument. According to this view, all we
this is just what it means to value a member in the passive sense is to be is good for the lion is necessarily bad have to work with in justifying moral
something—to endorse our natu- one of those to whom duties are owed, for the antelope, and even if we recog- requirements are the interests, motives,
ral motives for wanting it or caring who must be treated as an end. Kant nize our own duty to treat both of them or feelings of the individuals to whom
about it, and to see them as good believed that these two senses coincide, as ends in themselves, that doesn’t pro- they are supposed to apply, rather than
reasons. So as rational beings, we but Korsgaard says this is a mistake. The vide a moral resolution of the conflict. some transcendent or impersonal point
cannot act without setting some sort moral law that we rational beings give to Korsgaard concludes her book with of view. This does not mean moral prin-
of value on the ends of our actions. ourselves can give us duties of concern discussion of responses to this prob- ciples can’t be justified. If, for example,
for other, nonrational beings who are not lem by those who write about animal it is in the collective interest of members
Most important, Kant believes that themselves bound by the moral law—du- ethics, some of which outsiders to the of a human community to govern their
the value we cannot help assigning to ties to treat them as ends in themselves: field may find bizarre. One proposal is interactions by certain rules that permit
our ends is absolute value—value from to eliminate predation by arranging the peaceful coexistence and cooperation,
everyone’s point of view. This is a con- There is no reason to think that gradual extinction of predator species. that would provide a basis for morality
dition of our ability to endorse our ac- because it is only autonomous ra- Other defenders of the rights of animals that depends only on what is good-for
tions from an external believe we should pre- individuals, and not what is good abso-
point of view toward serve their habitats and lutely. And if there is a shared human
ourselves, which is the otherwise leave them sentiment of empathy toward the other
essence of rationality. alone entirely, so that animals, or some of them, then that
And it has a momen- all animals are wild. would support a requirement of humane
tous consequence: Korsgaard rejects treatment as part of morality, though its
both these extremes. content would depend on the strength
Your right to confer She believes we obvi- and scope of the sentiment, not on the
absolute value on ously shouldn’t kill absolute badness of animal suffering.
your ends and actions or exploit animals for Korsgaard acknowledges this type
is limited by everyone food, but we have no of position in her discussion of reci-
else’s (as Kant thinks obligation to take up procity as a basis for morality. She
of it, every other ratio- the position of a creator points out that it has an implication
nal being’s) right to by bringing it about that most people would find unaccept-
confer absolute val- that the world is popu- able: namely that if we encountered
ue on her ends and lated by creatures who rational beings so powerful that they
actions in exactly the are better off than the had nothing to fear from us, and who
same way. So in order ones who would oth- didn’t feel any sympathy for us, they
to count as a genuinely erwise be there. She could kill or enslave or experiment on
rational choice, the also believes that it’s all us without doing anything wrong. But
principle on which you right to keep animals as those who deny that anything has abso-
act must be acceptable pets, provided the so- lute value may be willing to accept that
from anyone’s (any ciety ensures that they consequence.
rational being’s) point of view—it tional beings who must make the are not abused. (Her book is dedicated, The second possible ground of resis-
must be consistent with the stand- normative presupposition that we by name, to the five cats she has lived tance is also mentioned by Korsgaard.
ing of others as ends in themselves. are ends in ourselves, the norma- with over the past thirty-five years.) One might hold that although humans
tive presupposition is only about Korsgaard also notes the curious fact are not more important or more valu-
This gives us Kant’s fundamental autonomous rational beings. And that many people are much more con- able than other animals, it is morally
principle of morality1 in two of its fa- in fact it seems arbitrary, because cerned with the preservation of species permissible for us to be partial to our
miliar formulations: act in such a way of course we also value ourselves from extinction than they are with the fellow humans and to count their in-
that you can will your principle as uni- as animate beings. This becomes welfare of individual animals, and she terests more, out of a “sense of solidar-
versal law; and treat all rational beings especially clear when we reflect on thinks this makes no moral sense. Spe- ity with our own kind.” We recognize
as ends and never merely as means. To the fact that many of the things that cies don’t have a point of view, and their the moral acceptability of such par-
treat others as ends in themselves is to we take to be good-for us are not survival doesn’t have value for them: tiality toward the interests of our own
regard the achievement of their goals good for us in our capacity as auton- families, for example, and Korsgaard
or ends as good in itself, and not just for omous rational beings. Food, sex, If you accept the idea that every- considers the possibility that in situa-
them. The practical upshot is that each comfort, freedom from pain and thing that is good must be good for tions of life- or- death emergency (rats
of us has a strong reason to pursue our fear, are all things that are good for someone, for some creature, then spreading plague) we would be mor-
own ends in a way that does not inter- us insofar as we are animals. you must deny that it makes sense ally justified in putting the interests of
fere with the pursuit by others of their to say that species or ecosystems our own species first, to lethal effect.
ends, and some reason to help them if have intrinsic value. According to But even if this is granted, it is a far cry
they need help. I find this argument for a revision of the view I have been advocating, it from endorsing a degree of partiality
But what does this imply about ani- Kant’s position completely convincing. is plain that the health of an eco- for the human species that allows the
mals? In Kant’s view, we impose the Korsgaard sums up: system matters because it matters lives of other animals to be routinely
moral law on ourselves: it applies to to the creatures who depend upon sacrificed to the pleasures of the table.
us because of our rational nature. The On a Kantian conception, what is it, and the extinction of a species In effect, that seems to be the princi-
other animals, because they are not special about human beings is not matters when it threatens the bio- ple to which most carnivores adhere,
rational, cannot engage in this kind of that we are the universe’s darlings, diversity and so the health of the though they are probably helped by the
self-legislation. Kant concluded that whose fate is absolutely more im- ecosystem and with it the welfare assumption that Korsgaard has gone to
they are not part of the moral commu- portant than the fates of the other of its members. great lengths to combat: that the loss of
nity; they have no duties and we have creatures who like us experience life is not really so bad for an animal.
no duties toward them.2 their own existence. It is exactly Her claim is that species have no value Moral disagreement is a constant fea-
the opposite: What is special about in themselves. They may have value for ture of the human condition, as we strug-
1
us is the empathy that enables us individuals, but only individuals have gle to find the right way to live. Whether
It is called “the categorical imperative” to grasp that other creatures are value in themselves. (This leaves aside we should kill animals for food is one of
for reasons that need not detain us. important to themselves in just the aesthetic value, which I suspect plays the deepest disagreements of our time;
2
Though Kant says we may treat ani- way we are important to ourselves, a part in many people’s attachment to but we should not be surprised if the
mals purely as means to our ends, he and the reason that enables us to species as such.) issue is rendered moot within the next
qualifies this by adding that we have a draw the conclusion that follows: few decades, when cultured meat (also
duty to ourselves not to treat them cru- that every animal must be regarded called clean meat, synthetic meat, or in
elly, since cruelty to animals results in
a callousness that may affect the treat-
as an end in herself, whose fate Korsgaard’s position is undeniably vitro meat) becomes less expensive to
matters, and matters absolutely, if powerful, and if it prevailed it would produce than meat from slaughtered
ment of our fellow humans. Korsgaard
suggests plausibly that this is “a product anything matters at all. be one of the largest moral transforma- animals, and equally palatable. When
of desperation” on Kant’s part, “an at- tions in the history of humanity. Let that happens, I suspect that our present
tempt to explain the everyday intuition Having secured the admission of the me close by describing two possible practices, being no longer gastronomi-
that we really do have at least some ob- other animals to the Kantian moral grounds of resistance to it. They would cally necessary, will suddenly become
ligation to be kind to animals.” community as passive members, Kors- also apply to the utilitarian argument morally unimaginable.
able enterprises with high ambitions. viewed more than 30 million times on while the Post floundered and the Gra- ing,’” Abramson writes, “as long as he
In 2011 Peretti brought in Politico’s YouTube.) Vice’s video ads were so hams decided to sell. was careful not to damage the quality
Ben Smith as news editor and gave him similar to its documentary reports that of the news.” Even though an initial ef-
the budget to hire accomplished young viewers could hardly tell the difference. fort in 2005 to establish a paywall on
journalists and a mandate to do news According to Abramson, BuzzFeed T he Post’s story, as Abramson tells the website had failed, Sulzberger took
in a way that would be as relatable and deleted posts that might offend spon- it, is a case study in strategic short- the risk of imposing one again in 2011,
shareable as BuzzFeed’s other content. sors, while Vice also killed stories or sightedness. Determined to keep up the this time with a design that allowed
Although BuzzFeed News at first spe- “sanitized” them when they jeopardized paper’s profit margins to satisfy share- free access for infrequent visitors but
cialized in little scoops that earned relationships with potential advertisers. holders, the Grahams— first Donald required regular readers to pay. The
fleeting attention, Peretti authorized The business of being provocative ap- E. Graham, Katharine’s son, and then new paywall proved wildly successful,
Smith to create an investigative report- parently did not include a readiness to Katharine Weymouth, Don’s niece— generating a new stream of income
ing unit to do more substantial stories. provoke business. In one respect, these made round after round of cuts in the from digital subscriptions.
In 2016, through the work of Craig Sil- new practices were contagious; despite newsroom. Don Graham also insisted But the financial pressures continued,
verman, BuzzFeed also played a criti- their misgivings, newspaper publishers on maintaining the paper’s focus on the and it was against that background that
cal part in identifying and debunking were soon creating their own in-house local Washington area, rejecting advice Abramson’s conflicts with Sulzberger
“fake news” in its original sense as agencies to produce native ads too. to turn the Post into a global brand. In developed, especially over the pressure
pure scams and fabrications. Vice’s By the early 2000s, financial pres- another bad decision, he turned down for closer collaboration between the ed-
move up the ladder of respectability sures were forcing the owners of tra- the proposal for what became Politico, itorial and business staffs. Abramson
came chiefly through its expansion into ditional media to sell or adapt. Several which has developed into a formidable objected to journalists being “dis-
video and development of international newspaper-owning families—the Chan- rival to the Post itself in Washington tracted from their work by endless
reporting “from the edge,” often exotic dlers of the Los Angeles Times, the reporting. When Kaplan became im- meetings with product managers” who
and dangerous locations— even North Bancrofts of The Wall Street Journal, plicated in the deceptive practices of were trying to come up with money-
Korea—where other news organiza- and the Ridders of Knight Ridder, for the for-profit education industry and making ventures such as apps and
tions would not go. example— decided to cash in while the Obama administration changed the sponsored events. None of the incidents
These undertakings were feasible they could, but the Sulzbergers at the rules for federal student loans, what she relates, however, appear to have in-
only because BuzzFeed and Vice at- Times and the Grahams at the Post had seemed like the Post’s salvation volved decisions that compromised the
tracted capital from patient investors held on. At first the Post seemed to be became a curse. Kaplan’s profits plum- paper; her struggles with Mark Thomp-
and advertising from major brands. With on a steadier course because of Katha- meted, and the Post’s entanglement son, the Times CEO, were as much over
no tradition of strict separation between rine Graham’s purchase in 1984 of the with the company damaged the pa- turf as principle. She resented being
the editorial and business sides, both or- Stanley Kaplan test prep company, per’s reputation. With no answer to the imposed upon. During a discussion
ganizations created their own in-house which became a gold mine, at least for a Post’s difficulties, the Grahams in 2013 with Sulzberger and Thompson about
staff to produce “native ads” that told while, by expanding into for-profit edu- turned to a buyer whom they trusted apps for monetizing the Times’s con-
stories in the same style as their edito- cation. Meanwhile, the Times made a to uphold the paper’s traditions, Jeff tent, she “snapped” at Thompson: “If
rial content and therefore had the same series of blunders, including the disas- Bezos, under whom it has rebounded. that’s what you expect, you have the
potential to be shared virally. For ex- trous decision to pay $1 billion in 1993 In contrast to the Grahams, Arthur wrong executive editor.” Although she
ample, in a charming BuzzFeed video for the Boston Globe, which it would Sulzberger Jr. refused to make deep claims that she was unwilling to sacri-
ad, “Dear Kitten,” an older, wiser cat be able to unload twenty years later for editorial cuts at the Times in the be- fice her “ethical moorings for business
explains to a newly arrived kitten the only $70 million. But the ensuing re- lief that if it maintained its standards, exigencies,” it’s not clear that any ethi-
pleasures and dangers of the house, versal of fortune is where Abramson’s people would continue to pay to read cal sacrifice was being asked of her.
eventually describing the delicious Pu- story holds its main interest. Chiefly it. The Times sold off its other assets, Yet in writing her book, or perhaps
rina Friskies that humans magically because of different decisions about slashed its dividends, and cut its busi- not writing enough of it, Abramson has
unlock from armored cans. (That ad, their core news business, the Sulzberg- ness staff. “Sulzberger was certain his landed herself in an ethical controversy.
a classic of viral advertising, has been ers succeeded in righting the Times, paper could be ‘the last man stand- Her critics have been hard on her, and
OREGON
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it’s not surprising. A writer on lapses Street Journal) through the center to ton Foundation. The Times entered into
in journalism who becomes an illustra- the left, they find an interconnected an arrangement that gave it advance ac-
tion of the profession’s problems is like network of news organizations that cess to Clinton Cash, a book by a Breit-
a preacher revealed to be a sinner. No operate under the constraint of estab- bart editor, Peter Schweizer, sponsored
CHARACTERS MUGS one in the congregation will talk about lished journalistic norms. by a project founded by Schweizer and
anything else. The result is two different patterns Steve Bannon and funded by Robert
These heirloom quality bone china mugs are
The sermonizer’s sins, however, in how falsehood travels. On the right, Mercer. The resulting Times article
printed and decorated with detailed illustra-
are sometimes a distraction from big- major news organizations amplified insinuated that in exchange for money
tions in the UK by a family business. Hand
ger problems. The major limitation of stories concocted in the right’s nether for the Clinton Foundation, Hillary
wash only. Suitable for use in a microwave.
Abramson’s book is that it offers too re- reaches, such as Pizzagate (Democrats Clinton had enabled a Russian firm to
Size: 3.54" H x 3.34" D. Capacity: 1.5 cups
assuring a picture of journalism. During were purportedly operating a child- acquire control of American uranium
her two years of work on it, she caught trafficking ring out of a pizza shop in assets, even though the Times had no
the Times and the Post on an upswing in Washington) and the Seth Rich murder evidence that she had intervened in the
their finances and BuzzFeed and Vice conspiracy (an aide at the Democratic decision to approve the deal, which a
on an upswing in their editorial stan- National Committee was killed suppos- committee representing nine govern-
dards. In her conclusion, Abramson edly because he divulged its e-mails to ment agencies had made. The Times
briefly discusses cuts in newsrooms WikiLeaks). False stories originated on article and other overwrought and
elsewhere, but the general drift of the the left as well, but they were generally often misleading pieces in the main-
book is that things are looking up. not relayed to a wider public. The right- stream press about the Clinton Founda-
SHAKESPEARE CHARACTERS MUG wing media failed to correct falsehoods tion and the Clinton and DNC e-mails
The mug is decorated with illustrations or to hold their journalists accountable became some of the most widely shared
depicting more than 40 of the central A wide-angle view would bring out
dress and hair, innovations in cuisine falling in love as the result of a dream, eron and by Chaucer in The Can- literary allusion to scrounge money
and table etiquette, as well as an anti- keeping one’s love a secret, amorous terbury Tales. from his audience before making
perspirant based on lead monoxide. He abjection in thrall to a beautiful slave his escape. The best examples of the
was such a Promethean figure that it is girl, and dying from unfulfilled love. Only some of this is correct. Kalila genre offer serious lessons in Koranic
tempting to think of him as a mythi- Ibn Hazm’s religious books were wa-dimna, a collection of animal fa- exegesis, grammar, lexicography, and
cal being, yet his career is well docu- burned by his enemies and he was im- bles, did circulate in medieval Spain, rhetoric. Although the maqama genre
mented. Still, the stigma of Andalusian prisoned several times. It is striking and some of its stories were recycled in cannot really be seen as an ancestor
provinciality was hard to shake off. how often and how many books were the Latin Disciplina Clericalis, a col- of the European frame tale, its resem-
When, in the following century, the burned in al-Andalus. Hakim II is re- lection of Eastern fables put together blance to the Spanish picaresque novel
Cordovan court poet Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih ported to have assembled a library of in the early twelfth century by Petrus as it evolved in the sixteenth and seven-
produced Al-‘Iqd al-farid (The Unique 400,000 volumes in Cordova covering Alfonso, a Spanish Jew who had con- teenth centuries has often been noted
Necklace), a compendium of the best all subjects and drawing on Greek, verted to Christianity. But Sindibad (or by literary scholars.
prose and poetry from around the Persian, and Indian wisdom, but al- Sendebar) doesn’t contain the tales of In the late eleventh century, the taifa
world, he included no examples by An- Mansur, the power behind the throne Sinbad the Sailor. It is a collection of kingdoms were losing ground to the
dalusians, with the exception of some of the last Umayyad caliphs, seeking moral tales, probably of Persian origin, Christians. In 1085 Toledo fell to the
poetry of his own. As it turned out, the to please religious scholars and jurists, in which a queen tells stories with the Castilian Alfonso VI. The Spanish
cultured elite in Baghdad did not think had the library purged of books deal- aim of securing the execution of the Muslims appealed to the Almoravids in
much of Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih’s verses. The ing with astrology, philosophy, and prince who has rebuffed her advances, Morocco for assistance, but, though the
vizier in Baghdad, Sahib ibn ‘Abbad, other sciences of the ancients, as well but a wise vizier tells other stories de- Almoravids won a great victory over
declared that the anthology was “noth- as other immoral subjects. The of- the Christians at Zallaqa, in southwest-
territory. They were more concerned Ibn al-Khatib was the last great ledo, had five thousand books publicly Catlos has produced an excellent po-
with conserving their territory in North chronicler of Muslim Spain, and so the burned in Granada. This sparked a litical history of al-Andalus. Still, he
Africa. Yet colonization projects were history of subsequent Nasrid rulers of series of rebellions in the countryside, says, “no book can claim in good faith
an important part of the Christian Re- Granada is somewhat conjectural. It and after they had been suppressed the to be the ‘definitive,’ ‘true,’ or ‘real’ his-
conquista. Castile and Aragon encour- has to be constructed from Christian defeated Muslims were forced to con- tory of Islamic Spain; there are simply
aged immigration from the south of sources. For example, it is uncertain vert to Christianity or leave the coun- too many factors to account for and
France, and military orders were orga- whether Muhammad X ever reigned, try. But suspicions remained about too many uncertainties clouding the
nized not only to fight but also to culti- though Muhammad IX and Muham- those Muslims, known as Moriscos, past.” This must be right. New sources
vate the lands they occupied. mad XI certainly did. For some time or “little Moors,” who had apparently may emerge, and certainly there are
Cordova fell to the Christians in 1236, the Nasrid rulers managed to set one converted, and in 1609 they too were more Arabic sources on al-Andalus
Valencia in 1238, and Seville in 1248. Christian kingdom against another and forcibly expelled. In the long century than have so far been properly stud-
Eventually only the Nasrid Emirate of buy them off with tribute. But the mar- that had preceded their expulsion, the ied. As Catlos is well aware, histories
Granada remained in Muslim hands. It riage in 1469 of Ferdinand of Aragon Inquisition conducted a culture war are written for their times, and each
owed its survival in part to its numer- and Isabella of Castile put an end to against such detestable things as wash- age poses its own questions about the
ous heavily fortified strongholds in the this tactic. The increasing effective- ing, the veil, the avoidance of pork, and past. It is hard not to read Kingdoms
Sierra Nevada mountains. The late four- ness of cannon in siege warfare was writings in Arabic. In the sixteenth- of Faith without reflecting on such con-
teenth century was its Indian summer, no less damaging to the Nasrids. In century topographical compendium temporary matters as Spain’s national
for this was when the spectacularly beau- 1492 Granada surrendered, and Mu- of marvels, Tuhfat al-muluk (Precious and regional identities, multicultural-
tiful Court of the Myrtles and Court of hammad XII, also known as Boabdil, Gift of Kings), its Egyptian author, Ibn ism, assimilation, and repatriation. It
the Lions were added to the Palace of handed over the keys of the Alhambra Zunbul, described meeting a Span- has been said that history is written by
the Alhambra. It was also when Lisan al- to the Catholic monarchs. ish Muslim who told him that all the the victors, but when one looks at the
Din Ibn al-Khatib, the vizier of the Nas- Muhammad XII had agreed to terms Arabic manuscripts in Spain had been historiography of medieval Spain one
rid ruler Muhammad V, produced his that included the free practice of the locked up in a house and that, if one put is struck by the readiness of so many
Sufi treatise, as well as poetry, maqamat, Muslim religion by his subjects, but one’s ear to the keyhole, one could hear modern historians to champion the
letters, chronicles, a travel narrative, those terms would not be honored. In the munching of bookworms feasting “losers” and even to question what vic-
and a biographical dictionary. 1499, Cisneros, the archbishop of To- on Arabic literature. tory really meant.
Reuters
The February 2015 Assassination had published more than sixty schol-
of Boris Nemtsov and the Flawed arly articles. According to his widow,
Trial of His Alleged Killers: Raisa, “physics was his life. He couldn’t
An Exploration of Russia’s talk about anything else.” But Nemtsov
“Crime of the 21st Century” then got caught up in the civic activism
by John B. Dunlop. that began to flourish in his country in
Stuttgart: Ibidem, the late 1980s and joined—along with
197 pp., $40.00 (paper) his mother, a physician—a movement
to protest the construction of a nuclear
Nemtsov plant outside Gorky.
a documentary film written and In March 1990, Nemtsov was elected
directed by Vladimir V. Kara-Murza to represent Gorky in the Russian par-
liament (then called the Supreme So-
The Man Who Was Too Free viet). He was the only non-Communist
a documentary film written candidate in a field of thirteen. In his
by Mikhail Fishman and first television appearance of the cam-
directed by Vera Krichevskaya paign, he stated: “I can only promise
one thing: I will not lie.” Important
Last November The Economist took elements of his bold platform were the
President Trump to task for dismiss- restriction of the powers of the KGB
ing the probable involvement of Saudi and the end of the Communist Party’s
crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Police officers detaining opposition leader Boris Nemtsov domination of politics. His fellow dem-
in the murder of the Saudi journalist during a rally in central Moscow, January 2010 ocrat Grigory Yavlinsky observed that
Jamal Khashoggi: “Mr. Trump’s gloss- Nemtsov, a natural orator, was “one of
ing over the murder of a peaceful critic promise that there would be a thor- tion. (It eventually died in the Senate the youngest, most brilliant, most intel-
is an alarming departure for Amer- ough investigation (there never was Committee on Foreign Relations.) ligent and most interesting people in
ica. . . . Previous presidents have sought one). Despite the fact that only weeks Now, four years later, John Dunlop’s the parliament.”
to balance moral values and national later the exiled Putin critic Alexander remarkable investigation has shed new Nemtsov appeared at the side of
interests.” Litvinenko announced on his London light on the Nemtsov assassination, al- Boris Yeltsin during the dramatic con-
Trump has been equally dismissive deathbed that he had been poisoned though he cautions that “there remains frontation with the plotters of the coup
regarding Russian President Vladimir by Putin, Bush welcomed Putin at his much that needs to be learned concern- against Mikhail Gorbachev in August
Putin’s alleged sponsorship of politi- summer home in Kennebunkport, ing how the crime was committed.” 1991—a show of support that Yeltsin
cal murders, saying in December 2015: Maine, the following summer, so that Dunlop calls it the “Russian crime of rewarded by appointing Nemtsov, then
“Nobody has proven that he’s killed the two could “work on their personal the twenty-first century.” Not only was only thirty-two, head of the Nizhny
anyone. . . . He’s always denied it.” And relationship” and enjoy a ride in Bush’s Nemtsov brazenly shot to death at the Novgorod regional government. These
in October 2018, after being pressed speedboat. Kremlin’s doorstep; as the Russian were difficult times in Russia. The
into finally admitting that Putin was President Obama’s response to the documentary films Nemtsov and The economy had broken down, with re-
“probably” involved in political assas- most shocking of all Russian political Man Who Was Too Free make clear, he sources severely depleted, and many
sinations, Trump added a caveat: “It’s murders, the February 27, 2015, shoot- had a huge influence on Russian poli- cities, including Nizhny Novgorod,
not in our country.” ing of the opposition leader Boris tics for two and a half decades. In the were in serious decline. Nemtsov ini-
Trump’s reactions are part of his Nemtsov, was also muted. Although words of a former Nemtsov colleague: tiated an ambitious program of eco-
established pattern of excusing the he immediately condemned the crime “He was like some sort of meteorite. . . . nomic reform, hailed nationwide,
Kremlin’s misdeeds. But his reluctance and called on the Russian government He soared, lit everything up—and then which included privatization of state
to address Russia’s political murders to conduct an impartial, prompt, and he was gone.” companies and rebuilding the region’s
is not a sharp departure from past transparent investigation, Obama did infrastructure. When new roads were
presidents’ responses. After President not follow up on a Senate resolution in- constructed, he inspected them per-
George W. Bush asked Putin about the troduced on March 4, 2015, by John Mc- Born in Sochi in 1959, Nemtsov sonally. According his deputy, Yuri
October 2006 killing of the journal- Cain and Lindsey Graham urging him to grew up in Gorky (renamed Nizhny Lebedev: “He would get behind the
ist Anna Politkovskaya in a telephone seek a United Nations Security Council Novgorod in 1990), where he trained as wheel of a Volga, after putting a glass
call just a few days after it occurred, resolution that would establish an inde- a physicist. He earned his Ph.D. at age of vodka on the hood, and, if he could
he was apparently reassured by Putin’s pendent investigation into the assassina- twenty-five and within just a few years drive two kilometers without spilling
the vodka, he would officially accept of his government. Although he asked Nemtsov dead. But for Putin, there may
JUST IN TIME FOR SPRING! the new road.” Nemtsov to remain in his post, Nemtsov also have been personal considerations.
Tall, handsome, and charismatic, resigned and, as the democratic oppo- Nemtsov did not hesitate to express his
Nemtsov had an exceptional connec- sitionist Aleksei Navalny later pointed contempt for him publicly, often with
tion with ordinary people, delighting out, “was blamed for all the horrors sarcasm. In a 2013 interview, Nemtsov
crowds at rallies with spontaneous and problems of Yeltsin’s team.” joked about Putin’s small stature and
jokes or impromptu dancing. In the remarked that “all Russia’s fierce ty-
words of Lebedev: “He charmed ev- rants have been small—Ivan the Ter-
eryone, from grandmothers to young N emtsov recalled in his 2007 mem- rible, Lenin, Stalin.” Later, in April
girls, young and old men. . . . He knew oir, Confessions of a Rebel,1 that Yel- 2014, when asked about Putin by a
how to talk to people.” In 1995, despite tsin’s appointment of Putin as prime Ukrainian journalist, Nemtsov blurted
the nationwide decline in the popular- minister—and thus Yeltsin’s designated out: “Fuck your Vladimir Putin!” The
ity of democratic reformers and the heir—in August 1999 came as an un- journalist then posted the interview on
resurgence of the Communists, he was pleasant shock, mainly because Putin YouTube. According to Albats, “He
elected governor of Nizhny Novgorod. was a product of the KGB. Nonetheless, was afraid of being killed. And he was
Yeltsin was by this time referring Nemtsov, who had become a leader of trying to convince himself, and me,
to Nemtsov as his heir apparent, even the newly formed Union of Right Forces that they wouldn’t touch him because
telling President Clinton when he in- (SPS) party, praised Putin publicly as he [had been] a member of the Russian
troduced him to Nemtsov in Washing- “a capable, experienced and intelli- government, a vice premier, and they
ton in September 1994: “Keep an eye gent person.” Nemtsov was elected as a wouldn’t want to create a precedent.”
on this young man. One day he will deputy to the state Duma in December
be president of Russia.” But Yeltsin’s 1999, and he abstained when the SPS
popularity declined sharply as the 1996 voted to support Putin’s candidacy as Dunlop, the author of two pathbreak-
presidential elections approached, and president in 2000, but he then worked ing studies of Russian terrorist inci-
Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking
former economic minister Yegor Gai- with the new president on a friendly dents, 3 presents convincing evidence
rounds up the most memorable walker-
dar tried to convince Nemtsov to run basis, in large part because Chubais, of Kremlin involvement in—and in-
writers from the 1700s to the modern day,
for president, telling him: “You are the now co-chairman of the SPS, insisted on deed direction of—Nemtsov’s murder.
from country hikers to urban strollers, from
only one of us reformers who can talk a conciliatory approach to Putin. Within six days of the murder, Russian
the rationalists to the truly outlandish.
with the people, with the babushkas Whatever illusions Nemtsov had police had rounded up and charged five
“Perhaps a walk is best revealed by [grandmothers].” Nemtsov responded: about Putin, they quickly faded as men from Chechnya, suggesting that
nonfiction accounts. [Beneath My Feet] “I will never be president. The presi- Putin began a systematic assault on the authorities had advance warning of
is a selection of these, spanning the dent has to send people to die.” the media and grossly mishandled such the crime. In fact, as Dunlop shows, the
centuries, arranged loosely by Nemtsov was not afraid to confront crises as the Kursk nuclear subma- FSB had been monitoring Nemtsov’s
theme. It features Petrarch in the Yeltsin when he objected to the presi- rine disaster in 2000 and the Moscow movements for months, and thus would
1330s, various golden ages of dent’s policies. In January 1996, after Dubrovka Theater hostage-taking in have had to know that a group of
pedestrianism—Romantic, Victorian the Kremlin unleashed a war in Chech- 2002. After the SPS failed to gain seats Chechens were following him.
and Edwardian—and nods to the nya, he collected more than a million in the 2003 Duma elections, Nemtsov The five were convicted and sen-
present day, with its own train of wan- signatures protesting Russia’s conduct became a political outsider and shifted tenced to long prison terms in June
derers. All told, thirty-six of them will of the war, drove a truck with the docu- to the streets, where he campaigned 2017, after a nine-month trial, reported
head over open fields, wild places, ments to Moscow, and delivered them loudly against the corruption and au- on in detail by the Russian website
parks and gardens, and cities.” to the Kremlin. Yeltsin was so angry thoritarianism of the Putin regime zone.media. Investigators initially put
—From Duncan Minshull’s introduction that he refused to speak to Nemtsov for and was frequently arrested and often out the theory that the Chechens were
months afterward. imprisoned for fifteen days (the usual motivated by revenge because of an
“Here is a book as certain to lift the But Yeltsin, who valued Nemtsov’s sentence for organizing an illegal pro- anti-Muslim statement Nemtsov had al-
spirits as the activity to which it is skills as a politician, overcame his test). Video footage of Nemtsov being legedly made after the Charlie Hebdo
dedicated: going for a walk. Beneath anger and in 1997 invited him to be a manhandled by police and shoved into killings in Paris. But when it emerged
My Feet is a collection of writings on first deputy prime minister, along with paddy wagons was a grim foretelling that the Chechens had moved to Mos-
pedestrianism, shrewdly selected by Anatoly Chubais, in his new cabinet. of what the future held for him. Once, cow in October 2014 (before the Charlie
Duncan Minshull, who, as the editor With so much left to accomplish in while sharing a prison cell with Na- Hebdo attack in January), supposedly
of two previous books on the subject, Nizhny Novgorod, Nemtsov refused the valny, Nemtsov explained to him why to start tailing him and prepare for his
is emerging as the laureate of walking.” offer. It was not until Yeltsin’s daughter he continued to subject himself to such murder, this motive was discarded.
—Andrew Martin, Country Life Tatyana made a special trip to see him hardships: “I want to be able to respect The Chechens were then said by
“We at the Idler are great fans of
and spent six hours tearfully begging myself.” Nemtsov and Navalny joined prosecutors to have taken on the job for
him to reconsider that he agreed to ac- forces in 2011–2012, when they led huge money—the equivalent of $234,000—
Notting Hill Editions, an independent
cept the position. protests—the largest since the collapse to be paid by the accused mastermind
publisher of beautiful hardback essay
As it turns out, Nemtsov’s decision of the USSR—against voting fraud in of the plot, Ruslan Mukhudinov, who
collections. In Beneath My Feet:
to join the Kremlin government was a the 2011 Duma election and against Pu- was said to have fled to the United Arab
Writers on Walking, the latest addition
huge mistake. In the words of the jour- tin’s 2012 reelection to the presidency. Emirates after the murder. There was
to their catalogue, radio producer
nalist Yevgenia Albats, a close friend of Meanwhile Nemtsov began produc- no explanation of how Mukhudinov, a
and editor Duncan Minshull brings
his: “The move to Moscow ruined Bo- ing meticulously documented reports driver for Ruslan Geremeev, the dep-
together writing on walking from
ris’s career. He would have gone on to on Kremlin corruption 2 and traveled to uty commander of the crack Chechen
Petrarch to the present day. Follow in
be Yeltsin’s successor in 1999 had he not Washington to urge the US Congress battalion Sever, acquired this money.
the footsteps of George Sand, Robert made that move.” Once in the Kremlin, to pass the Magnitsky Act, which sanc- Geremeev himself was initially re-
Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Will the uncompromising Nemtsov took on tioned Russian officials responsible for garded as a suspect because two of the
Self and others, and discover why the oligarchs, who were gobbling up the the 2009 prison death of the Russian accused were members of Sever, which
they saw walking as key to their state’s resources at bargain-basement lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Later, after was subordinate to the Internal Troops
creativity and wellbeing. As St. prices, and vowed that there would the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, of the Russian MVD (Ministry of In-
Augustine puts it, ‘solvitur ambulando be “no more crony privatization.” In Nemtsov lobbied hard to convince ternal Affairs), but controlled more
—it is solved by walking.’” —Idler particular, he vigorously opposed a Western governments to impose sanc- directly by Chechen president Ram-
noncompetitive auction of the telecom tions on members of the Russian gov- zan Kadyrov. Also, Geremeev lived
BENEATH MY FEET company Svyazinvest, which the oli- ernment. At the time of his murder, with the Chechens in a rented Moscow
WRITERS ON WALKING garchs Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Nemtsov was about to publish a scath- apartment. But amazingly, despite re-
Introduced and edited by Gusinsky were set to purchase at well ing indictment of Russia’s military in- quests from lawyers for the defense and
Duncan Minshull below its value. volvement in Ukraine, “Putin and the for Nemtsov’s family, Geremeev never
Linen clothbound hardcover with After the company was sold to the War,” and was organizing an antiwar appeared in court.
a red ribbon marker • $18.95 highest bidder, Berezovsky and Gusin- protest, scheduled for March 1, 2015. Significantly, investigators and pros-
On sale April 2nd sky were outraged. They designated These activities alone gave Putin and ecutors, all under Putin’s control, de-
Nemtsov “enemy number one” and the Kremlin plenty of reason to want
New York Review Books is the used their control of two main televi-
3
North American distributor of selected titles sion stations to launch a propaganda See my review of Dunlop’s The Mos-
from Notting Hill Editions, a UK publisher cow Bombings of September 1999:
devoted to the best in essay writing.
campaign against him. Nemtsov’s 1
Ispoved’ buntaria (Moscow: Partisan,
weakness for sex made him an easy tar- Examinations of Russian Terrorist At-
2007).
tacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s
get, and before long televised reports 2
On the reports, see my reviews of Rule in these pages, November 22,
of his “nude frolicking” with women Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov’s 2012. See also my review of Dunlop’s
caused his poll ratings to plummet. In Putin: The Results and Boris Nemtsov The 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 Beslan
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
August 1998 the Russian government and Leonid Martynyuk’s Winter Olym- Hostage Crises: A Critique of Russian
or visit www.nyrb.com defaulted on its debt and devalued the pics in the Subtropics in these pages, Counter-Terrorism in The Times Liter-
ruble, forcing Yeltsin to dismiss most May 15, 2008, and September 26, 2013. ary Supplement, May 19, 2006.
liberately withheld videotape evidence in prison soon after his arrest. Dunlop can do what he wants in Chechnya,
of the crime. Nemtsov was shot just be- rules out the possibility that Dadaev but not in Moscow or Russia.” And NEW FROM
fore midnight while walking across the was the first shooter, pointing out that Nemtsov’s close associate Vladimir
Bolshoi Moskvoretskii Bridge with his he had a good alibi. A videotape from Milov, a former deputy minister in the
Ukrainian girlfriend, Anna Duritskaya. a camera at the entrance to his apart- Russian government, noted that “by
(After initial questioning, Duritskaya ment building showed that he was there doing anything to Nemtsov [on his “As original and as full
returned to Kiev and was not called to at the time of the murder. (The judge own] Kadyrov would be crossing a red of apprehensive suspense
testify at the trial, again despite the urg- excluded this tape from evidence at the line and entering the territory under as a Graham Greene
ings of the defense.) The bridge stands trial, on the grounds that the camera’s Daddy’s [Putin’s] jurisdiction.” entertainment for grown-ups.”
at the foot of the Kremlin walls, an timer was supposedly damaged.) As Dunlop’s investigation reveals, —The New Statesman
area under extensive camera surveil- No murder weapons were found by the Nemtsov murder seems to have
lance by the Federal Protective Service police, and the claim by FSB ballistic involved a Kremlin power struggle. In
(FSO). Yet the FSO, headed at the time analysts that the six bullets all came defiance of Putin, the FSB, after round-
by Putin’s crony from the St. Petersburg from a single gun was challenged by ing up Kadyrov’s men, tried to impli-
KGB, Evgeny Murov, claimed that its an outside expert called by Dadaev’s cate the apparent organizers of the
more than a dozen CCTV cameras were lawyer. This expert concluded that crime, Kadyrov and his protector Vik-
directed at the area inside the Kremlin because investigators at the scene had tor Zolotov, who headed the MVD In-
walls, not on the bridge itself. mishandled ballistic evidence, it was ternal Troops at the time and was also
A Chechen named Zaur Dadaev, a close Putin ally from St. Peters-
Patrice Helmar
Lost Children Archive writing three thematically linked but
by Valeria Luiselli. profoundly different works: The Myth
Knopf, 383 pp., $27.95 of Sisyphus (a philosophical essay),
The Stranger (a novel), and Caligula (a
Tell Me How It Ends: play). In his case the works are mark-
An Essay in Forty Questions edly distinct, however, and each is fully
by Valeria Luiselli. realized on its own terms; whereas
Coffee House, 119 pp., $12.95 (paper) here, Luiselli’s novel, framed, like the
essay, by a family’s road trip across the
The Story of My Teeth United States from New York to Ari-
by Valeria Luiselli, translated from zona, repurposes both literal and the-
the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. matic material in ways that don’t feel
Coffee House, 195 pp., $16.95 (paper) fully realized in the novel.
The novel’s unnamed characters—
Faces in the Crowd the mother, the father, the ten-year- old
by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the boy (the father’s child from a previous
Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. relationship), and the five-year- old girl
Coffee House, 146 pp., $15.95 (paper) (the mother’s child, also from a previ-
ous relationship)—reflect the configu-
Sidewalks ration of Luiselli’s own family in the
by Valeria Luiselli, essay. Specific details from the essay
translated from the Spanish recur in the novel—from the idea of
by Christina MacSweeney, the mother in “the copilot’s seat” to the
with an introduction policeman’s quip about “the inspira-
by Cees Nooteboom. tion”—as well as the presence of two
Coffee House, 110 pp., $15.95 (paper) young sisters from Guatemala, whose
“grandmother sewed a ten- digit tele-
Although Valeria Luiselli lives in New phone number on the collars of the
York City, she isn’t herself American— dress each girl would wear throughout
not by birth (she was born in Mexico), the entire trip.” In the essay, Luiselli
nor by upbringing (her father was a writes, “sometimes, when our children
diplomat, her international childhood fall asleep again, I look back at them,
nomadic), nor, to a significant degree, or hear them breathe, and wonder. . . .
in her literary influences and style. But Were they to find themselves alone,
the five books she has written so far crossing borders and countries, would
expand our understanding of Ameri- my own children survive?” This ques-
can literature. Lost Children Archive, tion will be posed, and then acted out,
her third novel, is the first that she has in Lost Children Archive.
written in English (her first two were
very well translated from the Spanish
by Christina MacSweeney), and it is a In the course of Luiselli’s work as an
passionate, if complicated, American interpreter, helping children answer an
novel—or, perhaps more accurately, a NGO’s intake questionnaire (hence the
novel of the Americas. forty questions of her essay’s subtitle),
For all their inventiveness, neither of she learns that most children, coming
her earlier novels could have led read- from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salva-
ers fully to anticipate this ambitious, dor, and Honduras, have traveled “‘on
somber, urgent new work. Her first, Valeria Luiselli, New York City, January 2019; photograph by Patrice Helmar La Bestia,’ which literally means ‘the
Faces in the Crowd (2014), is the art- beast,’ and refers to the freight trains
fully fragmented account of a young factory, part of an exhibition exploring world of immigration courts (including that cross Mexico, on top of which as
woman who, as she writes about her connections between the gallery and the lives of several of the vast number many as half a million Central Ameri-
husband and small children, creates the Jumex empire. In an afterword, Lu- of children seeking asylum) and her can migrants ride annually.” In Lost
apocryphal translations of poems and iselli explains that “many of the stories family’s journey across the southern Children Archive, this journey—and
extracts from an autobiographical nar- told in this book come from the work- US by car. As Latin Americans, they the subsequent crossing of the bor-
rative by the (actual) Mexican poet ers’ personal accounts—though names, attract questions from policemen, one der into the American desert—forms
Gilberto Owen (1904–1952). Luiselli places and details are modified.” The of whom remarks sardonically, “So the subject of a fictional book within
plays with reality and literary conven- almost frothy quality of the book’s pac- you come all the way down here for the novel that the mother is read-
tion (in a manner familiar from Euro- ing arises in part, surely, from its con- the inspiration.” She notes that “since ing, Elegies for Lost Children by Ella
pean and Latin American fictions from ception as a serial: we are buoyed along 2006, around 120,000 migrants have Camposanto. The embedded narrative
Pirandello to Borges to Bolaño) and by episodic comic surprise. disappeared in their transit through reaches toward myth, producing some
combines that play with an often ironic, Between The Story of My Teeth and Mexico,” and that “between April 2014 of the most arresting prose in Lost
intermittently autofictional recording Lost Children Archive, Luiselli wrote and August 2015, more than 102,000 Children Archive:
of daily life’s more banal moments, in a slim, memorable volume of nonfic- unaccompanied children had been de-
a way popularized in contemporary tion, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay tained at the [US] border.” Horrified They were all asleep and did not
North American fiction by women in Forty Questions (2017), expanded by the statistics and the dark realities hear or see the woman who, also
writers like Sheila Heti or Jenny Offill. from an essay that appeared in Free- they represent, Luiselli writes: asleep, rolled off the side of the roof
Luiselli’s second novel, The Story of man’s magazine in 2016. (This was of their gondola. Tumbling awake
My Teeth (2015), is driven by the inimi- her second nonfiction book: her first, Perhaps the only way to grant any as she went down the jagged ridge,
table voice of Gustavo “Highway” Sán- Sidewalks, from 2010, is an allusive justice—were that even possible— she’d torn open her stomach on a
chez Sánchez, an auctioneer whose tall and, again, cleverly fragmented series is by hearing and recording those broken branch, and kept on falling,
tales about the literary provenance of of meditations on topics ranging from stories over and over again so that until her body thumped flat, into
his own teeth (he claims one belonged Joseph Brodsky’s grave, to bicycling, they come back, always, to haunt abrupt emptiness. The first living
to Saint Augustine, for example, and to the empty spaces in Mexico City.) In and shame us. Because being thing to notice her, the next morn-
another to Virginia Woolf) and whose the course of applying for permanent aware of what is happening in our ing, was a porcupine, its spines erect
different styles of storytelling salesman- resident status in the United States, era and choosing to do nothing and its tummy ballooned on larch
ship engage the reader in a lively narra- Luiselli and her family took a road about it has become unacceptable. and crab apples. It sniffed one of
tive dance. Filled with absurdist literary trip in the summer of 2014, from New her feet, the one that was unshod,
allusions (“My uncle Marcelo Sánchez- York to Cochise County, Arizona, near The conceptual overlap between Tell and then circled around her, unin-
Proust once wrote in his diary . . .”), the the US– Mexico border. The following Me How It Ends and Lost Children Ar- terested, sniffing its way toward a
novel was in fact commissioned by the year, back in New York, she became chive is considerable. It is not new for a bunch of drying poplar catkins.
Galería Jumex, an art gallery outside a volunteer interpreter in the federal writer to address a subject in multiple
Mexico City, as a serial narrative for immigration court. The essay recon- forms. Camus famously did this when Lost Children Archive contains
the workers at Mexico’s Jumex juice structs both Luiselli’s initiation into the grappling with his theory of the absurd, many formal complexities, but its most
basic structural feature is a division would she then finally pay attention
between the accounts of a mother and to us?” He successfully dragoons his A NEW TRANSLATION OF A MASTERPIECE
her young stepson. The novel’s first half sister into following him, and the two OF DUTCH LITERATURE
is recounted by the mother, a Luiselli- set off into the inhospitable landscape, A brilliantly inventive fiction that is also a work
like figure who takes a road trip with armed only with maps, a compass, a of burning political outrage, Max Havelaar tells
her family to Arizona. She and her hus- flashlight, and other sundries filched the story of a renegade Dutch colonial admin-
band are both sound archivists, albeit from their parents. istrator’s ultimately unavailing struggle to end
of different sorts: “We’d say that I was a This strand of the narrative is sus- the exploitation of the Indonesian peasantry.
documentarist and he was a documen- penseful, but its progression and reso- Havelaar’s impassioned exposé is framed by
tarian, which meant that I was more lution make clear that we are in the the fatuous reflections of an Amsterdam coffee
like a chemist and he was more like a realm of consoling—and not entirely trader, Drystubble, into whose hands it has fallen.
Thus a tale of the jungles and villages of Indonesia
librarian.” The impetus for their jour- convincing—fantasy rather than in that
is interknit with one of the houses and ware-
ney is her husband’s documentary proj- of truth. The children’s trajectory is in- houses of bourgeois Amsterdam, where the tidy
ect on the Apaches, for which he has terspersed, ever more heavily, with the profits from faraway brutality not only accrue but
received a grant: “The material he had fictional novel-within-a-novel, Elegies are counted as a sign of God’s grace.
to collect for this project was linked to for Lost Children. Before the children’s
Multatuli (meaning “I have suffered greatly”) was
specific locations, but this soundscape departure, their mother has realized
the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker, and his
was going to be different. He called it that “they are the ones who are telling novel caused a political storm when it came out
an ‘inventory of echoes,’ said it would the story of the lost children. They’ve in Holland.
be about the ghosts of Geronimo and
the last Apaches.” Up till now the nar-
been telling it all along, over and over
again in the back of the car”; appro-
MAX HAVELAAR Max Havelaar, however, is as notable for its art
OR, THE COFFEE as it is for its politics. Layering not only different
rator has been more practical and jour- priately, then, her stepson ultimately
AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH stories but different ways of writing—including
nalistic in her own approach, but she manages—as if, of narrative necessity, plays, poems, lists, letters, and a wild accumu-
too is pursuing a project, one she calls living out his stepmother’s projection—
TRADING COMPANY
lation of notes—to furious, hilarious, and dis-
a “Lost Children Archive,” the exact to conflate his and his sister’s story with Multatuli concerting effect, this masterpiece of Dutch
substance of which is initially unclear: that of the children in the Elegies. In Introduction by literature confronts the fixities of power with the
embarking on their journey, they are Pramoedya Ananta Toer protean and subversive energy of the imagination.
I’m not sure that I’d ever be able seeking the actual lost children (the A new translation by “D. H. Lawrence shrewdly understood Douwes
to—or should—get as close to my two young sisters from Guatemala); Ina Rilke and David McKay Dekker as above all a satirist and ironist. He
sources as possible. Although a they have themselves become lost chil- Paperback • $17.95 wrote. . . ‘The great dynamic force in Multatuli is as
valuable archive of the lost chil- dren; and the lost children in the Ele- Also available as an e-book it was, really, in Jean Paul and in Swift and Gogol,
dren would need to be composed, gies seem real to the boy. This melding and in Mark Twain, hate, a passionate, honourable
Max Havelaar is the March selection hate.’. . . Max Havelaar amply confirms this esti-
fundamentally, of a series of testi- culminates in the boy’s extended,
of the NYRB Classics Book Club. mation and shows the reader how hatred creates
monies or oral histories that reg- highly literary first-person stream- of- To join, visit www.nyrb.com or
ister their own voices telling their consciousness section near the novel’s a narrative bridge across two continents. . . A
call 1–800–354–0050
call, not for an antifeudal insurrection of natives
stories, it doesn’t seem right to turn end. The children walk following
against their abusive chiefs, but rather for the
those children, their lives, into ma-
overthrow of colonialism itself.”
terial for media consumption. the same eagles the lost children —Benedict Anderson
now see as they walk north into the
The paradoxical nature of the endeavor desert plain, beating muscled wings,
is apparent: the lost children, being threading in and out of black thun-
lost, cannot be heard. To hear these derclouds, they see them with their Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
stories, the narrator must find the chil- bare eyes, the five of them, as they or visit www.nyrb.com
dren, of course; next to this problem, walk onward, under the sun, keep-
her concern for potential media exploi- ing close together and silent, in a
tation is surely secondary. The alterna- tight horde, deeper and deeper into
tive is to invent their stories, in one way the silent heart of light, saying noth- The writer and artist Frédéric Pajak was ten when
or another. ing and hearing almost nothing, be- he began to dream of “a book mixing words
cause nothing can be heard except and pictures: snippets of adventure, random
the monotonous sound of their own memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes,
As the family travels westward the footsteps, on and on across these trees, the raging sea,” but it was not until he
parents’ relationship deteriorates, deadlands, never stopping because was in his forties that this dream took form as
while the plight of the immigrant chil- if they stop, they will die, this they Uncertain Manifesto.
dren at the border grows increasingly know, this they’ve been told . . .
The utterly original book that he produced is
pressing. Availing herself of a grand
American trope—the road novel—Lu- This bow to modernism—the passage a memoir born of reading and a meditation on
iselli turns it sideways: her protagonist is drawn from a sentence that contin- the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings,
is no footloose American man, but the ues for almost twenty pages—is but and fates of some of Pajak’s heroes: Samuel
immigrant mother of a nuclear fam- one of the novel’s many stylistic intri- Beckett and the artist Bram van Velde and, espe-
ily. They travel not between coasts but cacies. Its intention is clear (to unite, cially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow,
away from the city, from the center to through the boy’s voice, all the lost Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hash-
the margins—their progress, if it can be children), yet its effect is not ultimately ish, whose faltering marriage and love affairs and
called that, recalls The Sheltering Sky transcendent. critique of modern experience Pajak re-creates
more than On the Road. The reader is A commitment to formal innovation and reflects on in word and image. Pajak’s moody
privy to fairly little of their daily real- has been central to Luiselli’s work; UNCERTAIN black-and-white drawings accompany the text
ity, beyond the occasional diner expe- in this regard Lost Children Archive throughout, though their bearing on it is often
rience or reference to their audiobook is clearly linked to its predecessors.
MANIFESTO indirect and all the more absorbing for that.
choices (the opening sentence of Cor- Faces in the Crowd is made up of brief Frédéric Pajak Between word and image, the reader is drawn
mac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel sections—fragments—told from shift- A new translation from the French into a mysterious space that is all Pajak’s as he
The Road recurs, ominously). While ing perspectives. More adventurous, by Donald Nicholson-Smith seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist
we are granted charming glimpses of The Story of My Teeth, divided into
• a modern world more and more given over to a
the children, their gestures, questions, seven books (separated by marbled present without a past.
and games, the narrator’s husband re- papers), includes epigraphs in various
mains largely opaque, present chiefly forms, auction lot descriptions, a series Published with the support of
in his pedagogical role, educating the of photographs, and a timeline (com- the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
children about the Apaches, a history piled by Christina MacSweeney). The
of colonial violence and slaughter. new novel, still more formally compli-
The second half of the novel is mostly cated, is divided into four parts, each “[Pajak] meditates on the need to
narrated by the woman’s unnamed subdivided into sections (among them remember the past in order
stepson, addressing his younger sister. seven archival “boxes,” the contents to understand the present. . .
Dismayed by the parents’ unraveling of which are either listed or contained A complex portrait of the
marriage and his stepmother’s grow- in the text, including photographs, nature and power of narrative.”
ing obsession with the lost children, he maps, and news cuttings), and further —Kirkus Reviews
hatches a plan to run away: “I wanted into subsections. Among these are
to remind her that even though those fifteen parenthetical sections of the
children were lost, we were not lost, we Elegies by Ella Camposanto, whose Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit www.nyrb.com
were there, right there next to her. And surname means “cemetery” in Spanish
it made me wonder, what if we got lost, and is also the title of W. G. Sebald’s
posthumous book of essays. The major- I’m not sure, though, what “for Shouldn’t I simply document, like
!
ity of the subsections have less clearly later” means anymore. Something the serious journalist I was when
%
50 2019 directive titles—such as “MAPS,” “IN- changed in the world. Not too long I first started working in radio
VE
VENTORY,” or “COPULA & COPULA- ago, it changed, and we know it. and sound production? Realis-
New York TION.” The reader will understand that We don’t know how to explain it tic concern: Maybe it is better to
SA
Valeria Luiselli
adult narrator’s highly das forward. Constant
realistic (and, one sus- concerns: Cultural ap-
pects, often autobio- propriation, pissing all
graphical) reflections over someone else’s
2019 David Levine Calendar: to the child’s frankly toilet seat, who am I to
Enlightenment implausible fairy tale tell this story, micro-
$12.95 $6.48 adventure, to the dark managing identity poli-
myth-like storytelling tics, heavy-handedness,
of the Elegies—form am I too angry, am I
a patchwork designed mentally colonized by
simultaneously to re- Western- Saxon- white
flect and reinterpret categories, what’s the
our current reality. correct use of personal
The mother’s narra- pronouns, go light on
tive voice, in its vary- the adjectives, and oh,
ing registers, sounds who gives a fuck how
as natural as is possi- very whimsical phrasal
ble. Her thoughts me- verbs are?
ander between history
and the present day These reflections suggest
(“Searching online how hampered Luiselli
about the children’s may have felt in approach-
crisis, I find a New ing her intense and de-
York Times article manding factual material.
from a couple of years Serious and highly literary,
Shipping is FREE within the US! back, titled ‘Children passionately politically en-
Why not order one for yourself at the Border.’. . . No gaged, unwilling to rely on
and several for your friends? one thinks of those forms that feel to her out
Go to: shop.nybooks.com! children as conse- of date and insufficient,
quences of a histori- she is, at the same time,
cal war that goes back constrained by an aware-
decades”); personal ness of critiques that might
Name reminiscences (“And be leveled against her fic-
then the boy turned Photograph from Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive tion. For her fellow artists,
Address ten. We took him out the imposing reach of this
to a good restaurant, gave him presents found a new way to document it, project—both to acknowledge and
(no toys). I got him a Polaroid camera we might begin to understand this somehow to assimilate all of these
and several boxes of film, both black new way we experience space and questions—is invigorating and ab-
City/State/Zip
and white and color”); and literary and time. sorbing. It is also risky. As she en-
artistic analysis (of figures as varied deavors to marry fact-like fiction (the
Country
as Walt Whitman, Susan Sontag, and It seems logical to infer from this as- cross- country journey of a Luiselli-
J Check enclosed* Emmet Gowin). She recalls demon- tute observation that Luiselli’s novel like storyteller in the company of her
Charge my: J AMEX J Visa J MasterCard strating outside an immigration deten- itself endeavors to find a new way to family) with fairytale-like fiction (the
tion center on Varick Street in New “document” the present. In a digres- child’s adventure story, complete with
Credit Card Number
York, in the company of a priest named sion of impressive creative frankness, implausible happy ending), with dark
Father Juan Carlos. She remembers Luiselli’s character muses on the perils myth (the Elegies), with a strong po-
Expiration Date her mother leaving the family to join a of modern storytelling: litical intention that nevertheless aims
Mexican guerrilla movement when she to avoid propaganda, all the while
Signature herself was ten years old (something Political concern: How can a spinning formal complexity upon for-
that actually happened in Luiselli’s radio documentary be useful mal complexity, there is ultimately
Item Qty Price Total life). She tells us about a remarkable in helping more undocumented a sense that the center cannot hold.
2019 Calendar X $6.48 = $
(and real) educator named Stephen children find asylum? Aesthetic Art is an act of transformation: the
Haff, whose one-room schoolhouse problem: On the other hand, why passage of material through an imagi-
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teaches underprivileged kids to trans- form of storytelling, for that mat- something new. That something new
OR Rest of World per item X $10.00 = $
late Cervantes and instructs them in ter, be a means to a specific end? must have its own integrity, must be
Latin. I should know, by now, that in- greater than the sum of its parts. Ca-
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The first half of the novel reads less strumentalism, applied to any art mus’s explorations of the absurd in The
GRAND TOTAL $ like fiction than like a record of time form, is a way of guaranteeing re- Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus
spent in a café with a particularly inter- ally shitty results: light pedagogic measure the distinction between a nov-
* Check or US money order must be made payable to The
New York Review of Books in US dollars, drawn on a US bank esting friend—one whose observations material, moralistic young-adult elistic embodiment of human experi-
account. We cannot accept international money orders. are alternately delightful and tren- novels, boring art in general. ence and an essayistic distillation of
Please allow 1–2 weeks for delivery within the US and chant, unexpected and familiar; one Professional hesitance: But then thought. Many elements of Lost Chil-
2–3 weeks for delivery outside the US. whose presumption of her interlocu- again, isn’t art for art’s sake so dren Archive are extraordinary, and
tor’s intelligence and erudition is both often an absolutely ridiculous yet the ultimate act of transformation
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flattering and quickening. One pas- display of intellectual arrogance? has not occurred. One might of course
sage, on our contemporary relation- Ethical concern: And why would contend that, in this ghastly time, such
435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014,
or for credit card orders only, call (646) 215-2500 or
ship to time, while not original (these I even think that I can or should a transformation is no longer possible;
visit shop.nybooks.com thoughts have been articulated in the make art with someone else’s but Luiselli’s decision to write a novel
past), seems especially true today: suffering? Pragmatic concern: at all surely affirms otherwise.
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Low Visibility
James McAuley
Twilight of the Elites: for three months, a previously dormant tary elections in May, their sharpest “The French social model is so in-
Prosperity, the Periphery, anger has erupted. Demonstrators have opposition came from within: to many tegrated that it almost seems a natu-
and the Future of France beaten police officers, thrown acid in gilets jaunes, the ten who had put their ral, preexisting condition,” Alexis
by Christophe Guilluy, translated from the faces of journalists, and threatened names forward—among them a nurse, Spire, a sociologist of inequality at the
the French by Malcolm DeBevoise. the lives of government officials. There a truck driver, and an accountant— École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Yale University Press, 177 pp., $25.00 has been violence on both sides, and the were traitors to the cause, having dared Sociales, told me recently. A number of
European Parliament has condemned to replicate the elite that the rest of the the gilets jaunes I met said that despite
Driving was already expensive in France French authorities for using “flash- movement disdains. the taxes they pay, they do not feel they
when in January 2018 the government of ball guns” against protesters, maiming Concessions from the government benefit from any social services, since
President Emmanuel Macron imposed and even blinding more than a few in have had little effect. Under mount- they live far from urban centers. But
a tax that raised the price of diesel fuel the crowds. But the gilets jaunes have ing pressure, Macron was forced to anyone who has ever received housing
by 7.6 centimes per liter and of gasoline a flair for cinematic destruction. In abandon the carbon tax planned for assistance, a free prescription, or six-
by 3.8 centimes (about 7 and 3 cents, late November they damaged parts of 2019 in a solemn televised address in teen weeks of paid maternity leave has
respectively); further increases were the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; in early mid-December. He also launched the benefited from the social protection
planned for January 2019. The taxes January they commandeered a forklift so- called grand débat, a three-month system. The effect of redistribution is
were an attempt to cut carbon emissions and rammed through the heavy doors tour of rural France designed to give often invisible.
and honor the president’s lofty promise And yet the rich in France have gotten
AND
A CUR RENT L IST IN G
Marlborough Graphics Alexandre Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10019 Wildlife Art,
40 West 57th Street, New York 10019; (212) 541-4900 (212) 755-2828; inquiries@alexandregallery.com; westendantiques.com; michaelbankswildlifeart.com
graphics@marlboroughgallery.com www.alexandregallery.com Contact: mike@westendantiques.com.
Monday-Saturday 10AM–6PM Emily Nelligan: Hush
R. B. Kitaj A Memorial Exhibition 20" x 16"
Ezra Pound II, 1971 On view through April 13,
5 color screenprint, 2019
photo screenprint
38 ½ x 29 ½” Varujan Boghosian:
Edition of 70 A Selection
On view through April 13,
Other prints by R. B. Kitaj 2019
available
His aesthetic tome includes an introduction by famous french writer,
Frédéric Beigbeder and 247 drawings by Chansarel, one for each of
AND
Broadway’s corners—from up under the Broadway Bridge all the way
down to the Staten Island Ferry.
The artist completed this illustrated catalog in just seven days and
describes it as “a true declaration of love to New York.” City residents
and visitors alike will delight in the familiar and fresh vignettes of our
beloved Gotham.
A c ol l e ct i o n o f n o tab l e ar t an d Each Drawing Avenue book purchased will be accompanied by one of
exhi bi t i o n s f r om ar o u n d th e w o r l d . the 247 original gouache paintings.
Please join us on the 14th of March, 2019, from 6 to 8PM, to welcome
Chansarel back to where it all began and toast the full circle of his proj-
ect. RSVP and direct inquiries to: info@hugogalerie.com.
are all well connected to Paris. But La France périphérique: comment on a world is only the visible part of a soft ployed gardener that he could find a new
there are many small towns where the sacrifié les classes populaires, in which power emanating from the working job if he merely “crossed the street.”
future never arrived, where abandoned he contended that since the mid-1980s, classes that will force the elites to re- Yet nothing quite compares to the
nineteenth- century train stations are France’s working classes have been join the real movement of society or statement Macron made in inaugurat-
now merely places for teenagers to pushed out of the major cities to rural else to disappear.” ing Station F, a startup incubator in
make out, monuments of the way things communities—a situation that was a For now, however, there is just one the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris,
used to be. In these towns, cars are the ticking time bomb—partly as a result member of the elite whom the gilets housed in a converted rail depot. It is
only way people can get to work. I met a of rising prices. He advanced that view jaunes wish would disappear, and calls a cavernous consulate for Silicon Val-
fifty-five-year-old truck and taxi driver further in 2016 with La Crépuscule de for his violent overthrow continue ley, a soaring glass campus open to all
named Marco Pavan in the Franche- la France d’en haut—now translated even as the movement’s momentum those with “big ideas” who can also pay
Comté in late November. What he told into English as Twilight of the Elites: subsides. €195 a month for a desk and can fill out
me then—about how carbon taxes can Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Fu- an application in fluent English. (“We
seem like sneers from the Parisian ture of France—a pithy screed against won’t consider any other language,” the
elite—has stayed with me. “Ask a Pa- France’s bobo elite and what he sees as An intense and deeply personal ha- organization’s website says.) Google,
risian—for him none of this is an issue, its shameless embrace of a “neoliberal,” tred of Macron is the only unifying Amazon, and Microsoft all have offices
because he doesn’t need a car,” Pavan “Americanized society” and a hollow, cry among the gilets jaunes. Eighteen in it, and in a city of terrible coffee,
said. “There’s no bus or train to take feel-good creed of multicultural toler- months before the uprising began, this the espresso is predictably fabulous. In
us anywhere. We have to have a car.” ance. In 2018, one month before the was the man who captured the world’s June 2017 Macron delivered a speech
I cited that remark in a Washington rise of the gilets jaunes, he published imagination and who, after populist there. “A train station,” he said, refer-
Post story I filed from Besançon; in No Society, whose title comes from victories in Britain and the United ring to the structure’s origins, “it’s a
the online comments section, many at- place where we encounter those who are
There is an aspect of entitlement to the place them, and 50 percent said they be- the gilets jaunes have resulted in a per- born in Paris in 1949 and has become
gilets jaunes, who are also protesting lieved in a global “Zionist” conspiracy. sonal apology from the president and a a fixture in French cultural life, a pro-
what the French call déclassement, the Members of the movement are often slew of concessions. lific author, a host of a popular weekly
increasing elusiveness of the middle- quick to point out that the gilets jaunes broadcast on France Culture, and a
class dream in a society in which eco- are not motivated by identity politics, member of the Académie Française,
nomic growth has not kept pace with and yet anyone who has visited one Guilluy, whose analysis of la France the country’s most elite literary insti-
population increase. This entitlement of their demonstrations is confronted périphérique ultimately fails to grapple tution. In the words of Macron, who
appears to have alienated the gilets with an undeniable reality. Far too significantly with France’s decidedly immediately responded to the attack,
jaunes from immigrants and people of much attention has been paid to the peripheral overseas territories, does he “is not only an eminent man of let-
color, who are largely absent from their symbolism of the yellow vests and far not shy away from the question of iden- ters but the symbol of what the Re-
ranks and whose condition is often ma- too little to the fact that the vast major- tity. He sees a racial element to the frus- public affords us all.” The irony is that
terially worse.2 “It’s not people who ity of those who wear them are lower- trations of la France périphérique, but Finkielkraut—another former leftist
don’t have hope anymore, who don’t middle- class whites. In what is perhaps he does not see this as a problem. Some who believes that France has plunged
have a place to live, or who don’t have the most ethnically diverse society in of the most frustrating moments in his into inexorable decline and ignored the
a job,” Rokhaya Diallo, a French activ- Western Europe, can the gilets jaunes work come when he acknowledges but dangers of multiculturalism—was one
ist for racial equality, told me recently, truly be said to represent “the people,” refuses to interrogate white working- of the only Parisian intellectuals who
describing the movement. “It’s just that as the members of the movement often class behavior that seems to be racially had supported the gilets jaunes from
status they’re trying to preserve.” claim? Priscillia Ludosky, arguably the motivated. “Public housing in outlying the beginning.
The gilets jaunes have no substantive first gilet jaune, is a black woman. “It’s communities is now a last resort for I spoke to Finkielkraut after the at-
ideas: resentment does not an ideol- complicated, that question,” she told workers hoping to be able to go on living tack, and he explained that the gilets
ogy make. They remain a combustible near the major cities,” he writes in Twi- jaunes had seemed to him the evidence
en Colère, one of the movement’s main denounces; it does not address the anti- tition had launched. She was only inter- In the days after the attack,
online bulletins. “For many days, the Semitic violence to which Finkielkraut ested in discussing what she called the Finkielkraut lamented not so much the
government and its friends in the na- was subjected, nor does it apologize French government’s “systematic abuse grim details of what had happened but
tional media seem to have found a new to a national figure who had defended to manipulate public opinion.” She also the squandered potential of a moment
technique for destabilizing public opin- the movement when few others of his believes that a government-media con- that has increasingly descended into
ion and discrediting the Gilets Jaunes prominence dared to do the same. spiracy will stop at nothing to smear paranoid feverishness. As he told me:
movement,” it begins. “We denounce the A month after our last conversation, the cause. “If there was one person “This was a beautiful opportunity to
accusations and the manipulations put in I called Priscillia Ludosky back, to see who ever said something homophobic, reflect on who we are that’s been com-
place by this government adept at fake if she had any reaction to the recent it was on the front page of every news- pletely ruined.”
news.” But this is all the communiqué turn of events in the movement her pe- paper,” she told me. —February 21, 2019