The New York Review of Books

Is Humbert Humbert Jewish?

Mark Ford

Nabokov’s conception of the artist as quasi-divine inventor means that—as is the case with one of his great heroes, James Joyce—critics tend to find themselves in the role of enchanted hunters looking for clues and connections, spotting recondite allusions, praising the novels’ elaborate artistry, or elucidating labyrinthine patterns. It would take a bold critic to read such a dazzling, seemingly omniscient, and utterly self-conscious oeuvre as depicting the bars of Nabokov’s own cage. Andrea Pitzer doesn’t, perhaps, go quite that far, but she does invite us to step back a little and ponder the oddness of the relationship Nabokov’s writings create between the fictive and the historical.

What Is Autism?

Jerome Groopman

In her new book, The Autistic Brain, Temple Grandin has reached a stunning level of sophistication about herself and the science of autism. Her observations will assist not only fellow autistics and families with affected members, but also researchers and physicians seeking to better understand the condition.

How to Succeed in Business

Anne Applebaum

Sheryl Sandberg is disinclined to talk about luck, and this makes sense: If that’s all it was, then what lessons can she sell to women in Lean In? What will women talk about at Lean In circles? What will they write on the Lean In Facebook page? Her lack of interest in the mechanics of her own career is equally understandable. One can quite see that “Be dishonest about your working hours” or “Be at the right place at the right time” doesn’t have the same ring as “Opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.” That sort of advice wouldn’t have made this book into a best seller.

The Real Men of England

Fintan O’Toole

Everett Collection

Patrick Stewart as the Soviet spymaster Karla and Alec Guinness as the British spy George Smiley in the BBC’s adaptation of John le Carré’s novel Smiley’s People, 1982

In the official morality of states, treason and patriotism are poles apart, as starkly opposed as love and hate, right and wrong. David Cornwell, writing as John le Carré, has spent more than half a century blurring ...

101.3 degrees

Jerzy Ficowski, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer

In memory of Max Brod
who breaking Kafka’s will
didn’t burn his manuscripts

With a temperature of 101.3
and an exile’s traveling bag
here comes
the old cough
cured out of Franz Kafka

It drowns out the manuscripts
spared from
fire’s kindness

And whispers Max
I forgive you Only
what to do with this
hundred-volumed silence

Max my Max
burn this my silence

The Angel of the Bizarre

Julian Bell

Frankfurter Goethe-Haus/Freies Deutsches Hochstift

Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare, 1790–1791

“Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst,” a survey first conceived and mounted by the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, has been retitled “The Angel of the Odd” by the curators of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it runs until June 9. Ambitious and forceful, the exhibition plunges you in a giddying aesthetic abyss. There are a great ...

Inside Our New America

Joseph Lelyveld

Joel Sternfeld/Luhring Augustine, New York

Joel Sternfeld: Wet ’n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida, September 1980; from Sternfeld’s first collection of photographs, American Prospects. Originally published in 1987, the book has recently been issued in a new edition by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.

Before jumping off on his brave spelunking descent into the “new America,” George Packer offers up an orientation, or maybe it’s ...

‘The Glory of Certain Moments in Life’

Michael Dirda

John Masters is now an almost forgotten novelist, though there was a time when Bhowani Junction and Nightrunners of Bengal might be glimpsed on the paperback racks of any drugstore. Masters had been an officer in the British army in Burma during World War II, though he seldom spoke of the jungle fighting or the defense of hilltops and narrow places against overwhelming odds. A figure of quiet authority, he ...

The Resurgence of the Kurds

Christopher de Bellaigue

Nikos Economopoulos/Magnum Photos

Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), at a PKK training camp, Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, 1991. He is now imprisoned on the Turkish island of Imrali. The paintings in the background are of Öcalan, left, and a PKK soldier killed in battle.

The announcement on March 23 by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of a cease-fire with Turkey is only one sign among many ...

‘Choices for an Uncrowned Queen’

Timothy Garton Ash

Khin Maung Win/AP Images

Aung San Suu Kyi standing in front of a painting of her father, General Aung San, Rangoon, October 2011

It’s good to be back. I was last here thirteen years ago, at the turn of the century. I spoke about transitions to democracy at the headquarters of the National League for Democracy (NLD), with Aung San Suu Kyi in the chair. I wrote about ...

Haiti: The Compromising Reality

Mischa Berlinski

Antonio Bolfo/Reportage by Getty Images

A boy sleeping in a pile of plastic bottles at the Truitier landfill, Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, April 2011

Amy Wilentz knows Haiti very well. She has a quarter-century of experience with the country. She speaks excellent French and Creole. She understands Haitian history intimately. She has the patience to sit with Haitians for hours, and the empathy to listen as her Haitian informants ...

Time Regained!

James Gleick

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Catalonia, Spain © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2013

Salvador Dalí: The Sense of Speed, 1931

A pregnant moment in intellectual history occurs when H.G. Wells’s Time Traveller (“for so it will be convenient to speak of him”) gathers his friends around the drawing room fire to explain that everything they know about time is wrong. This after-dinner conversation ...

The Muse Makes Mischief

Dan Chiasson

Red Doc> is the poet Anne Carson’s “sequel” to her novel in verse, Autobiography of Red, which told the story of Geryon, the red monster slain by Herakles in one of his lesser-known labors. Carson’s Geryon was a contemporary boy; he was gay, art-inclined, and, as he knew from reading his own myth, doomed to an early death. These internal differences were manifest in his redness and his ...

Bolívar: What Price Glory?

Enrique Krauze, translated from the Spanish by Hank Heifetz

Private Collection/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Art Library

Simón Bolívar; nineteenth-century chromolithograph

In the Complete Works of Simón Bolívar appears a prose poem so unusual that some historians have questioned its authenticity. Entitled “Mi delirio en Chimborazo” (My Rapture on Chimborazo) and dating from around 1822, it describes the ascent (certainly only partial and perhaps completely imaginary) of the Ecuadorian volcanic peak of that name. Bolívar writes that, on his “march ...

Looking for Wittgenstein

Ray Monk

Ben Richards/Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Swansea, Wales, September 1947

“Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein’s character,” the British philosopher Colin McGinn once remarked, “is with the photographs that exist of his face.” Looking into Wittgenstein’s eyes, McGinn went on, it is hard to meet his gaze for very long:

It is possible to be fairly sure which pictures McGinn has in mind ...

How They Stopped Slavery: A New Perspective

David Brion Davis

Brooklyn Museum

Eastman Johnson: The Ride for Liberty, the Fugitive Slaves, circa 1862

While historians have long countered the myth that slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War, they have clung to the view that the Union’s opposition to slavery developed very slowly and almost reluctantly, largely due to the Republicans’ commitment to the constitutional ban on “interference” with slavery that already existed in slaveholding states ...

The Saga of the Flaming Zucchini

Jenny Uglow

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Pierre Bonnard: Lunch at Grand-Lemps, 1899

The fork in Bee Wilson’s title is considered in detail, with companion implements like spoons and chopsticks, only toward the end of her eloquent and information-packed book on the technology of cooking and eating. If the phrase “consider the lilies” hums in your mind, that is entirely apt, as we learn that the modern spoon, if not the ...

Ruthless Iran: Can a Deal Be Made?

Roger Cohen

Abbas/Magnum Photos

Portraits of Iran’s supreme leaders, Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, Tehran, May 2001

Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are unusual among former staffers of the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council in their deep affection for the Islamic Republic of Iran. This attraction, which knows few bounds, finds its apotheosis in Going to Tehran. Their stated goal is “the most objective analysis of Iranian ...

Visions of Indian Art

William Dalrymple

Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums

Nainsukh of Guler: Balwant Singh’s Elephant Clawed by a Lion, 1752

One morning in 1740, a thin young man could be seen heading down the steep cobbled road leading from the Kashmir Gate of the Punjabi hilltown of Guler, and making for the banks of the fast-running river Ravi far below. Nainsukh was just short of thirty, with a slightly hesitant expression ...

Simone Weil

Susan Sontag

Simone Weil in Marseilles, early 1940s

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to ...

Mandela & Communism: An Exchange

Rian Malan and Paul Trewhela, reply by Bill Keller

To the Editors:

I enjoyed Bill Keller’s review of my scribblings [“The Heretic,” NYR, March 21] but must take issue with his view of the tiny but hugely influential South African Communist Party (SACP). “Most…members weren’t all that Communist,” writes Keller, seemingly wishing to impute that our Reds were only pretending to believe in the totalitarian Soviet ideal. I’m afraid Mr. Keller is wrong.

‘Beat Women’: An Exchange

Joyce Johnson and Lyndall Gordon, reply by Andrew O’Hagan

To the Editors:

What is the Scottish definition of biography? I ask this because Andrew O’Hagan [“Jack Kerouac: Crossing the Line,” NYR, March 21] is the second Scottish reviewer in recent months to call my book The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac a memoir. I suppose it would be futile to point out that I end the book in 1951, six years before Kerouac entered my life, and that my research was not conducted in the bedroom but in the unsexy archives of the Berg Collection, where I tracked Jack’s most important relationship—the one he had with his work.

Can Shell Be Stopped?

Subhankar Banerjee

To the Editors:

On February 27, just as Ian Frazier’s review of my anthology Arctic Voices was being published [NYR, March 7], Shell announced that after both its rigs, Noble Discoverer and Kulluk, suffered heavy damage and were cited for EPA violations, it would not drill in Alaska’s Arctic waters in 2013.

Shell’s mishaps are dissuading other companies that also bought leases in Alaska’s Arctic waters ...

Bolshevik Jazz

Gregory Friedin

To the Editors:

I very much admired Michael Scammell’s masterful and exhaustively researched biographies, and I read with great interest his nuanced review of Douglas Smith’s Former People: The Last Days of The Russian Aristocracy [NYR, March 7]. All the more surprising, then, is the impression of chronological confusion conveyed in the passage dealing with the fashion for fox-trot, brought to Russia by Americans working for the American Relief Administration in 1921–1923.

‘Challenge to the Church’

Garry Wills, reply by William Pfaff

To the Editors:

I cannot object if a person finds a book of mine too onerous or boring to read but, in that case, he should not pretend to review it, as William Pfaff did [“Challenge to the Church,” NYR, May 9]. To spare himself the labor of discussing Why Priests? he wanders back to things remembered from the time when he still read books. We get his views on ...

How She Survived

David D. Hebb

To the Editors:

Many thanks to Professor Robert Paxton for clarifying the question regarding the Flandre/Maréchal Pétain/La Marseillaise story [“Vichy’s Ocean Liner,” Letters, NYR, May 9], but there is more, I think, of interest relating to this ship.

First, it should be noted that this ship was only in small part a Vichy project. The origins of the ship go back at least to December 1938 when ...

Andy Warhol and His Foundation: The Questions

Richard Dorment

After Andy Warhol died in February 1987, his will directed that a foundation should be set up in his name, funded with proceeds from the sale of some 95,000 pictures, prints, sculptures, drawings, and photographs left in his estate. Warhol’s bequest made no provision for the authentication of his artwork. But in 1994 the foundation initiated work on a multivolume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s art. In the following year the foundation’s directors set up an authentication committee to pass judgment on artworks attributed to him.

How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled

Paul Krugman

Austerity economics is in a very bad way. Its predictions have proved utterly wrong; its founding academic documents haven’t just lost their canonized status, they’ve become the objects of much ridicule. None of this should have come as a surprise: basic macroeconomics should have told everyone to expect what did, in fact, happen, and the papers that have now fallen into disrepute were obviously flawed from the start. This raises the obvious question: Why did austerity economics get such a powerful grip on elite opinion in the first place?

The Ecstasy of a Modern Romantic

Joan Acocella

In her youth Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) more or less created what we now call American modern dance, and she soon became famous for it. She was also a beauty, leaving behind her a trail of glamorous lovers. But by 1927, when she was fifty, all that was over. Duncan was living in a rented studio in Nice. She was barely performing any longer, and years of hard living—above all, heavy drinking—had coarsened her looks. She had no money. She went to parties in order to eat the canapés. Partly, no doubt, to improve her financial situation, she decided to do something that she had talked about for years: write her memoirs.

The Bombers’ World

Christian Caryl

The biggest question surrounding the marathon bombings is the one of motive: Why did they do it? Given what we know so far, it seems likely that it was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, who instigated and planned the attacks—but he, of course, is dead. The imprisoned Dzhokhar has told investigators that the brothers undertook the bombings as retaliation against the US for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That sounds plausible enough on the face of things, in view of what we know about the politics of jihadi terrorists in other parts of the world. At the same time, there are many other details of the Tsarnaev brothers’ case that make it seem starkly unique, more of an outlier than something that can be easily slotted into a larger pattern.