Zeitschrift | Ausgabe
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 6
What counts as eccentric in the garden, and what counts as a folly? As a child I used to be taken on Sunday walks to the Needle’s Eye in Wentworth, South Yorkshire, a kind of sharp pyramid of stone some forty-five feet tall and pierced by an arched passage. It was erected in the early eighteenth century by the Second Marquess of Rockingham, who wanted to make good on a bet that he could drive a coach-and-four through the eye of a needle. If he could do that, the implication was, it shouldn’t be hard for him, a rich man, to enter the kingdom of heaven—whatever Jesus says in Matthew.
CONTENT
James Fenton
Here’s Looking at Yew. In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.
Frances Wilson
Descriptions of a Struggle. Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.
Christopher de Bellaigue
Erdogan in the Ruins. The failure of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to prepare for and respond to Turkey’s devastating earthquake is the crowning abomination of his long misrule.
Martin Filler
The Architect of Subtraction. Adolf Loos’s radical designs pared down architecture to its most basic elements.
Christine Smallwood
The Exorcist. Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty.
Anahid Nersessian
The Couple Form. Two new poetry collections embrace the potential of traditional forms and of breaking away from them.
Amy Knight
Putin’s Folly. A year after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is mired in a seemingly endless military conflict. Is Putin the master tactician underestimating his adversary?
Darryl Pinckney
Zimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novels and essays are marked by her struggle against gender hierarchies and the legacies of colonialism.
Anna Della Subin
A Body That’s Divine. A recent book catalogs the Old Testament’s physical descriptions of God, who ate, probably drank, got mistaken for an ordinary man, and was likely circumcised.
Andrea Cohen
Purchase. a poem
Orville Schell
Appeasement at the Cineplex. Unable to resist China’s huge market, Hollywood has proven willing to alter its films to avoid offending Beijing.
Alejandro Chacoff
The Unbearable Weight of Levity. In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.
Oleh Kotsarev, Tatiana Retivov
An Airplane or a Helicopter. a poem
Phillip Lopate
Drowned Worlds. In Nineteen Reservoirs, her study of New York City’s upstate water supply, Lucy Sante explores how a more or less effaced past continues to haunt the march of progress.
Ingrid D. Rowland
An Exceptional Witness. The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish community of Rhodes before its destruction by the Nazis.
Ed Park
Becoming Enid Coleslaw. In each dense and delirious issue of Eightball, Daniel Clowes was driven to perfectionism, ricocheting like mad from story to story and foretelling some of the comic medium’s possible futures.
Susan Neiman
Longing for Reconciliation. The philosopher Jacob Taubes was torn between the desire to heal the split between Judaism and Christianity— particularly between Germans and Jews—and his doubts that it was possible.
Zuyi Zhao
The Garden Between Days. a poem
Gary Saul Morson
The Master of Toska. Janet Malcolm called Chekhov’s work “a kind of exercise in withholding.” A new book traces the development of his mastery to two crucial years.
Eric Foner
A Regional Reign of Terror. Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.
Karan Mahajan
Avoidance Issues. In his new novel, Mohsin Hamid wholeheartedly embraces the role of the “world writer.”
Nick Laird
Auden’s Dialectic. In Auden’s complete poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, the poet veers from puckish youth to adult diagnostician and back again.
Adam S. Wilkins, Ruth Klassen Andrews, James Palmer, Sarah Weinman, et al.
True Crime and Punishment: An Exchange