The New York Review of Books

The Dull New Global Novel

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:00:00 -0800

Tim Parks

Félix Vallotton: The Patriotic Couplet, 1893

Not all writers share the same sense of whom they are writing for. Many may not even think they are directing their work at any audience in particular. All the same, there are clearly periods of history when, across the board, authors’ perceptions of who their readers are change, something that inevitably leads to a change in the kind of text they produce. The most obvious example is the period that stretches from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century when writers all over Europe abandoned Latin for the vernacular. Instead of introducing their work, as before, into an international arena presided over by a largely clerical elite, they “descended” to local and national languages to address themselves to an emerging middle class.

In the history books this shift to the vernacular tends to be presented as a democratic inspiration that allowed a wealth of local vitality into the written text and brought new confidence to the rapidly consolidating national languages. That said, it was probably driven as much by ambition and economic interest as by idealism. There came a point when it no longer made sense to write in Latin because the arbiters of taste were now a national rather than international grouping. Today we are at the beginning of a revolution of even greater import that is taking us in a quite different direction.

As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go toward it than away from it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

In recent months authors in Germany, France and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect how little it would have dented the reputations of Zola or Verga had they not achieved immediate publication in London.

Woodcut by Félix Vallotton, 1900

This development has been hugely accelerated by electronic text transmission. Today, no sooner is a novel or even an opening chapter complete, than it can be submitted to scores of publishers all over the world. It is not unusual for foreign rights to be sold before the work has a local publisher. An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world. Buying the book, a reader becomes part of an international community. This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

The proliferation of international literary prizes has guaranteed that the phenomenon is not restricted to the more popular sector of the market. Despite its questionable selection procedures and often bizarre choices, the Nobel is seen as more important than any national prize. The Impac in Ireland, Mondello in Italy, International Literature Award in Germany are rapidly growing in prestige. Thus the arbiters of taste are no longer one’s own compatriots—they are less easily knowable, not a group the author himself is part of.

What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960’s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his novels would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerhard Baaker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring.

More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.

If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position since, as Borges once remarked, most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.

What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.

In Congo's Virunga Hills: Gorillas Under Siege

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:30:00 -0800

Jeremy Bernstein

A juvenile gorilla leaning on an adult male in Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo, November 28, 2009 (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)

When I was about eleven my father gave me James Ramsey Ullman’s book High Conquest. This was Ullman’s romantic and occasionally inaccurate account of the history of mountain climbing, published in 1941. I was fascinated by the fact that Everest, the highest mountain in the world, had not yet been climbed. But what made the most impression on me were the Mountains of the Moon, a range on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo—then the Belgian Congo. I was struck by how difficult they were to access, and by the fact that although they were on the equator, they were covered with snow. Two officers in Henry Stanley’s 1887 expedition to East Africa were the first Europeans to see them; Stanley named the range “Ruwenzori,” an anglicized version of the Rukonjo name “Rwenjura” meaning “hill of rain.”

Of rain there is plenty, and the mountains are rarely visible from below. The first proper climbing expedition in 1906 was led by Prince Luigi Amedeo Giuseppe Maria Ferdinando Francesco, Duke of the Abruzzi, one of the greatest climbers who ever lived. The Duke and his people climbed and named all the major peaks. For Amadeo, the biggest challenge about these mountains was not in the climbing, but in slogging through horrible mud-covered bogs to get to them. At the time it sounded wonderful to me and I decided that someday I would go. It took until 1989 before I got there.

Photos by Jeremy Bernstein

I was with a small group of French climbers. I had done enough study of the mountains to realize that the climbing itself would be over my head, but that I could trek to the base of the glacier from which the ascent began. But first we had to get there. We flew from Brussels to Kigali, Rwanda, and then by mini-bus to the Congolese frontier. What little I saw of Rwanda’s forested hills impressed me. Of the ethnic tensions that would lead to its terrible genocide five years later I had no inkling. We crossed into eastern Congo and took another mini-bus to Goma to spend the night. In recent years, Gomo too has been swept up in the horrific violence of East Africa. Then we got on a Japanese mini-bus for a three day trip to Mutwanga where the trek into the mountains began. The bus trip was a nightmare of bad roads and breakdowns. But at Mutwanga we got a rare view of the mountains, and then began the three-day trek that would take us to our base camp. It was just as hard as Ullman had described. The bogs were awful and some of the terrain was so steep that one had to use a fixed rope. But the base camp was beautiful; it was on the shore of a small lake with the mountains looming over it.

The next day my companions did their climbing while I explored the terrain below. Afterward, we headed down to visit the mountain gorillas, a rare subspecies of Eastern Gorilla that is found only in national parks in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nowadays, it is estimated that there are about 700 left. The group in Rwanda was made famous by the American zoologist Dian Fossey, who was murdered by poachers. We chose to visit the group that is in the Virunga mountains in Congo. A visit to Virunga National Park had to be reserved months in advance and we had been warned that if we showed up late we would lose our place; we hiked up a grassy hill to the park headquarters arriving just in time. We were assigned a tracker and an assistant with a rifle, perhaps to protect us from animal attack, and led along a broad path for about an hour. Then without explanation the tracker headed into the jungle, hacking his way through the vegetation to cut a path. This went on for at least another hour. I thought he would tell us that he had tried but the gorillas had gone and that we should come back another time. Then he stopped, put his hand to his lips, and pointed up. There in a tree a few feet above us was the most remarkable animal I have ever seen.

He was enormous, but he didn’t seem menacing. He studied us with seeming indifference. Why were we there? Why were we looking at him? We moved on and found ourselves in a small cluster of gorillas. The young ones rushed around and brushed up against us. Their mothers watched cautiously. And then something happened that continues to haunt me. There was a mother with a baby. We stopped to look and she held it up for us to see.

Today, I don’t know how much time is left for these animals. Virunga National Park is situated at the very center of the conflict in eastern Congo: rebel groups hide in its hills and smuggle weapons over the border with Rwanda. In 2008, seven gorillas were shot—it’s likely that they were eaten by rebel soldiers—and at one point, the park rangers were driven away by the fighting. Last year, some rangers were able to return and the park reopened to tourists, but without international help the mountain gorillas at Virunga may disappear forever. The Wildlife Conservation Society seems to be one of the few outside groups trying to save them.

The Buster Keaton Cure

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:51:00 -0800

Charles Simic

Buster Keaton in “The Love Nest” (1923)

I have a collection of Buster Keaton’s films I bought in the late 1980s when they first became available on video. It’s made up of nineteen half-hour shorts and his nine full-length films, all made between 1920 and 1928. Every few years I take a look at some of them, and recently, being thoroughly depressed by our wars and our politics, I watched a dozen of his shorts to cheer myself up. Almost ninety years old, these shorts are still very funny and visually beautiful. They make the Dada and Surrealist pranks everybody was scandalized by in that era seem dated and tame in comparison.

Charlie Chaplin’s bum is at the mercy of a cruel world. Keaton, with his impassive face and a hat flat as a pancake, is a stoic. He confronts one setback after another with serenity worthy of a Buddhist monk. In one short film, “The Goat” (1921) he’s standing on the sidewalk behind two tailor’s dummies, under the impression that they are at the end of a bread line. When he discovers his mistake, he moves on quietly.

Keaton’s movies were a big success in Europe since his type of comedy doesn’t need a translation. I first saw one of his shorts in occupied Belgrade during the Second World War. I liked him instantly. His films are full of remarkable acrobatic stunts. Keaton started out in vaudeville when he was four years old working with his parents, whose comedy act included a lot of roughhousing; he was thrown by his father across the stage and sometimes even at the hecklers in the audience.

A plot of a good comedy can be written on a postcard, Keaton said. For instance, in “Cops” (1922) a girl tells the hero, either you become a successful businessman, or I won’t marry you. Everything that happens in this delightful short follows from his effort to fulfill her request.

Keaton claimed that it was much harder to make a short comic film than a full-length one in which the story is uppermost, since a short film is nothing but a series of gags that follow from the original premise. For the gags to work, they have to be timed just right. Even after a film was completed, he reshot some gags if he felt they were executed either too quickly or too slowly—and many of them, of course, were extremely difficult to do. In “Neighbors” (1921), when a young woman cries for help from a third-floor apartment across the street, Keaton and two other men each step out of their three respective windows to form a human totem pole and rush to her rescue.

At the same time, he warned against the dangers of rehearsing a comic scene too much. To be successful, a scene had to keep its feel of improvisation. In “One Week” (1920), an uncle gives to a pair of newlyweds a build-it-yourself house and a plot of land. A disappointed rival alters the numbers in the boxes containing the house, so that when Keaton begins to assemble it, the result is freakish. A door on the second floor opens to nowhere; the kitchen sink is on the outside wall; the rain pours through an opening in the roof and the house spins in the high wind. An obstinate and ingenious man, he tries to cope with whatever new difficulties present themselves.

In another short, “The Scarecrow,” a couple are eloping on a motorcycle with a side car, pursued by the girl’s father, when in their speed they sweep up a priest who happens to be crossing the street. “Where is the ring?” the priest asks. Using a nut Keaton has just unscrewed, the priest pronounces them man and wife.

In the world in which everything can go wrong, and usually does, Keaton remains unperturbed. In “The Boat” (1921), after the boat he built in his garage sinks, he and his wife and two kids are set adrift on the sea in a bathtub he brought along to serve as a lifeboat. One of the little ones cries for a drink of water, and Keaton, without any sign of anxiety, pours him a glass from the tap, which the kid drinks as they sink. As the old stoic philosophers said, the sage is immune to misfortune. Since most of us are not sages, we can at least laugh.

The "Devastating" Decision

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Ronald Dworkin

Against the opposition of their four colleagues, five right-wing Supreme Court justices have now guaranteed that big corporations can spend unlimited funds on political advertising in any political election. In an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, the Court overruled established precedents and declared dozens of national and state statutes unconstitutional, including the McCain-Feingold Act, which forbade corporate or union television advertising that endorses or opposes a particular candidate.

Port-au-Prince: The Moment

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Mischa Berlinski

My chair was on casters and began to roll. A large earthquake starts as a small earthquake. I saved my novel: Control+S. The horizon swayed at an angle. I had time to think many things--that's how long the quake lasted. I thought that I should stand under the lintel of the doorway. I took my laptop and started to leave. Then, unsteady on my feet, I wondered whether the laptop wouldn't be safer where it was. I put it back on the table. I went outside.

A Knife at the Door

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Francine Prose

Lit: A Memoir
by Mary Karr

In an introduction to the tenth-anniversary edition of her memoir The Liars' Club (1995), Mary Karr recalls the enthusiasm that it inspired when it first appeared:

In the World of Facebook

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Charles Petersen

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal
by Ben Mezrich

Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America
by Julia Angwin

Facebook, the most popular social networking Web site in the world, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in the winter of 2004. Like Microsoft, that other famous technology company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original. A quarter-century earlier, Bill Gates, asked by IBM to provide the basic programming for its new personal computer, simply bought a program from another company and renamed it. Mark Zuckerberg, the primary founder of Facebook, who dropped out of college six months after starting the site, took most of his ideas from existing social networks such as Friendster and MySpace. But while Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.

Ukraine's Past on Trial

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:30:19 -0800

Timothy Snyder

Black and white printed postcard. European Union of Ukrainian Organizations in Exile 1935, Reprinted by K.O. CYM, Winnipeg, 1953 (ArtUkraine Information Service)

Stalin is guilty. On January 13, four days before the first round of Ukraine’s presidential elections, a Kiev court condemned him and six other Soviet high officials for genocide committed against the Ukrainian nation during the famine in 1932-1933. All seven men, of course, are long dead—but the history at issue in the case is very much alive.

The famine certainly did happen, and it was deliberate. In the course of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan for the industrialization of the Soviet Union, farms were collectivized so that their yields could be appropriated by the state. The resistance of peasants was broken by tens of thousands of executions and millions of deportations. Collective agriculture proved inefficient, especially during the violent transition. When Soviet Ukraine began to suffer a famine in 1932, Stalin ordered the seizure of grain, the slaughter of livestock, the isolation of Ukrainian villages from the outside world, and the sealing of the Ukrainian Republic’s borders.

The victims of the famine died slowly, in humiliation and in agony. Peasants made their way to cities, where they starved on the sidewalks. In the countryside, people ate grass and roots and worms. Women prostituted themselves for bread. Children in orphanages drank each others’ blood and ate their own excrement. Mothers asked children to eat their bodies when they died. Roving groups of bandits kidnapped the weak and vulnerable and sold their flesh. In spring 1933, the villages went quiet. The cattle and horses and chickens were gone. The cats and the dogs, too, had been eaten. The birds stayed away. Burial crews took the dead (and the dying). Those crews kept no good records, and Stalin suppressed the next census. Historians estimate that more than three million people died in Soviet Ukraine.

Then came the Great Terror of 1937-1938, which struck Ukraine with particular force. The “kulaks,” a Russian word for prosperous peasants, were the first target. Very often these were Ukrainians, people who had somehow survived collectivization, famine, or the Gulag. They were condemned by an “operational troika”—a party member, a state police officer, and a prosecutor. The troikas would review hundreds of files a day and almost always issue one of two verdicts: death or the Gulag. A minute-long examination of a file was the entire judicial process; the defendants were not present, they did not hear the case, they had no legal defense. If they were sentenced to death, they were taken to a forest, or a field, or a garage, and shot. If they were sentenced to the Gulag, they learned the verdict on the train to Siberia. Of the 681,692 recorded death sentences in the Great Terror, 123,421 were carried out in Soviet Ukraine. The Soviet death pits are still being discovered.

The outgoing Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, welcomes the Kiev court’s verdict against Stalin. Having placed fifth in the first round of the elections on January 17, he knows his term of office will soon come to an end. Yushchenko has worked hard to institutionalize a Ukrainian national memory these last five years, and knows that neither Viktor Yanukovych nor Julia Tymoshenko, the two presidential candidates competing in the run-off election on February 7, will take anti-Stalinism to such lengths—not least because it annoys Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In Russia, in contrast to Ukraine, Stalin still enjoys a certain popularity; and some politicians have assailed the court ruling as a provocation. This would only be true insofar as Russians choose to identify themselves with Soviet leaders: most of the defendants (including Stalin himself) were neither Russians nor born within Russia’s present boundaries. The difference in attitudes towards the Stalinist past is in some measure the result of Yushchenko’s preoccupation with history. He seems to hope that this verdict will make the label of genocide impossible to undo, since it “shifts any discussion of the famine in Ukraine from the political to the legal realm.”

Should history be a matter of law? This trial, approved by Yushchenko and arranged by the Security Service of Ukraine, summons the spirit of Stalinism that it was meant to dispel. Rather than a regular judicial proceeding, the trial was conducted by a modernized troika: a Security Service officer, a prosecutor, and a judge, meeting in closed chambers for a single day, then passing judgment on ghosts. The Ukrainian Security Service, which pressed the charges, is the institutional successor of the Soviet state police of the 1930s. Perhaps this explains why none of the seven defendants were officers of the OGPU, as the Soviet state police was known then? The OGPU were closely involved in the famine as well as in the Great Terror. Vsevolod Balyts’kyi, the head of the Ukrainian branch of the OGPU in those days, might have been considered alongside Molotov and the other five identified in the trial as Stalin’s fellow perpetrators. He threatened local officials with the Gulag, forcing them to collect grain from the starving; and he sealed the internal borders of the republic so that they could not beg in other parts of the Soviet Union.

In this trial, the Security Service of Ukraine served (by its own account) as censor, researcher, friend of the court, and spokesperson. Its directors decided which archival records were classified; then assembled 320 volumes of these to make its case, then proposed how the court might evaluate that material; and finally publicized the verdict as a press release. Thus carried out, the trial exhibited an unfortunate tendency of the post-Communist world: the placing of responsibility for historical research, criminal prosecution, and national memory within a single institution (or a group of closely allied institutions). Until now, access to archives in Ukraine has been easier than in Russia, which means that some young historians are writing dissertations about the Soviet Union in Kiev rather than Moscow. But this verdict is a worrying sign of a new orthodoxy.

There is a better way than legal séances to spread knowledge of the horrors of the twentieth century: keep archives open. There is also a better way to draw attention to Stalinism: treat it as European history. President Yushchenko has called for an international tribunal to judge Stalinist crimes in Ukraine. Simpler would be cooperation among the national memory institutes of post-Communist Europe: rotation of their staff historians from country to country, sharing of documents from archive to archive, and joint research on repressive policies. Without such ventilation, the memory ministries can lurch towards Orwellian nationalism. The European Union, which often fails to take account of historical differences between eastern and western Europe, might fund such cooperation, as a kind of Marshall Plan of the mind. Only international discussion can balance European history, and only a balanced history can serve European understanding.

Talibans à la française?

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:13:00 -0800

Malise Ruthven

Barbie and her Muslim counterpart, Fulla, who is produced by a Syrian company (trendhunter.com)

Standing in the passport line at the Gare du Nord in Paris before boarding the Eurostar to London, I become aware of anxious rustling behind me. A family party includes a woman wearing the niqab, the tent-like veil worn in Arabic and Gulf countries that covers the face and head and has a slit for the eyes. I am relieved the woman is behind me in the queue. While she may have no problem passing the police booth marking the exit from France, the UK border control, which has its own booth just a few feet away (an arrangement that saves travelers from having to show their passports on arriving in London), tends to be more exacting. There may be further blockages at the X-ray machines, where passengers are expected to remove their outer garments. In Western Europe, such Muslim attire has long raised understandable—if awkward—security concerns; but in France, it has also provoked a much broader controversy about the nature of French society.

The French debate over the “burqa” has been sharpened by the new report of an all-party parliamentary commission. The panel’s findings encompass both the burqa—the head-to-toe garment with a screen for the eyes worn by Afghan women, hardly ever seen in France—and the niqab, which leaves a slit for the eyes. (In France the term burqa is used generically to encompass the niqab and all other veils such as the North African haik that conceal the wearer’s identity.) While falling short of advocating an outright ban, the commission suggested that restrictions on the burqa should be imposed in public places such as hospitals, schools, post offices, banks and on public transport where identification is necessary. According to the commission it should be left to the Council of State, France’s highest judicial authority and court of last resort, to decide if legislation on banning full veiling is necessary.

The issue is highly political, and yet the discussion is curiously theoretical, even scholastic. Only a tiny proportion of France’s five million Muslims wear the full veil—fewer than 2,000 women according to the Interior Ministry. In Paris such veils are rarely, if ever seen, except in the vicinity of expensive hotels and shopping malls that attract rich tourists from the Gulf during the summer months. In late January the only niqabs to be seen in Paris were being worn by demonstrators from the immigrant feminist advocacy group Ni Putes Ni Soumises (“neither whores nor submissives”) who favor a ban and were protesting at the Socialist Party’s decision to abstain from voting on the commission’s report.

According to Jean Bauberot, a sociologist at the School for Advanced Studies in Paris, the spread of the full veil in the banlieus where most Muslims live is apocryphal. “There are no statistics on the wearing of the burqa,” he told a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times, adding that “for a calm, rational debate we need knowledge.” Yet an Ipsos poll finds that a clear majority of voters—57 percent against 37 percent—favors a law banning the burqa in France.

The majority in favor of a ban, including Ni Putes, insist that full veils encourage the formation of a separate Muslim and communal identity that challenges the very basis of French laïcité. The same reasoning underpins the ban on headscarves and other conspicuous signs of religious affiliation such as large crosses and yarmulkes, that has already been imposed in French high schools. Secularism, the English equivalent of laïcité, appears too weak to convey the resonances acquired from two centuries of republican history, seen as the struggle for reason and enlightenment pitted against the forces of darkness and religious obscurantism. Legislators and intellectuals interviewed by the weekly Le Point are virtually unanimous condemning the burqa. André Gerin, the communist deputy who presided over the commission sees it as a symbol of the “black tide of communitarianism”: the visible sign of a deep fundamentalist tendency he describes as talibans à la française.

For Guy Carcassonne, a professor of law, the case against the burqa rests on broad grounds that the law must forbid actions that are harmful to society: shouldn’t such a deliberate act of self exclusion be considered socially harmful? Every society, he says, depends on a concept of public order that reflects the customs of the day: today’s social norms dictate that one does not hide one’s face.

Jacques-Alain Miller, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, argues that covering one’s face goes way beyond protecting women from male desire: it amounts to a symbolic castration of male onlookers. Unlike nuns, whose cloistered lives were governed by ecclesiastical authority, women who wear niqabs in public are displaying rather than hiding themselves. They are “exhibiting the costume of medusa,” he says, making their husbands into a jealous God. Hence, for Miller, veil-wearing divides society from the family, when the family should instead be the foundation of broader social interaction.

Unlike most French politicians, however, who see it somewhat simplistically as a fundamental threat to the republic’s values, Miller recognizes the veil’s rich ambiguities—despite his own objections to it. Everyone, he suggests, interprets it according to their own system of values: submission, modesty, an affront to female rights, an inalienable right, a matter of religious belief, of self-segregation, even aggression. It is a snare for illusions that, left to themselves, will soon be co-opted and domesticated by the fashion industry, as punk has been appropriated and tamed. John Galliano will have burqas in his next collection—and we already have an imitation Barbie doll in full veil.

Meanwhile, although niqabs are much more evident in London than in Paris, the issue has not provoked much concern in Britain. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is on record as calling the veil a “mark of separation,” but very few would regard outlawing a piece of clothing that a small number of women regard as essential to their religious observance as being compatible with “freedom and democracy.” In a recent BBC television debate, a headscarf-wearing (but facially exposed) student from Oxford, who heads that university’s Islamic Society, dismissed arguments that Muslims were smuggling Islamic law into Britain. Her defense of the full veil relied exclusively on the principle of a person’s right to choose her own attire. (In the US, wearing a headscarf, whether in public or in school, would be seen as protected under freedom of religion, and restrictions on the full veil have until now been limited to identification photos.)

Conspicuously absent from the debate, in France and in Britain, is any consideration of the Islamic veil’s historic dimensions. It seems clear from earliest sources that the first Muslim women went about unveiled; and some of Muhammad’s female followers fought courageously alongside his men. The custom of veiling appears to have developed later as a reaction to the institution of slavery. As the Islamic state expanded, a growing flood of slaves were captured as booty, and sold in the slave markets. Many of these were young women who were incorporated into Muslim households as concubines. Slave women were required to expose the head, arms, legs, and upper parts of the chest, and to enhance their value slave merchants ensured that they were well versed in singing, dancing, music and poetry—necessary skills for the arts of seduction and love.

In the face of this challenge the supposedly respectable women retreated into the sanctity of the home. By the twelfth century Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149-1209), one of the most renowned and influential of Quranic commentators was arguing that the freeborn believing woman must be fully covered. “A free woman’s entire body is a shameful nakedness in itself,” he wrote. Razi’s reasoning was commercial: Quranic writings on modesty did not apply to slaves because they were items of property whose purchase or sale required “an investigative and careful inspection.”

The long-term social consequences are hardly surprising, given that in parts of the Muslim world slavery was only formally abolished in the middle of the last century. Veiling and sexual apartheid, though not universal, became the hallmark of urban Muslim societies from Indonesia to Morocco. With colonial administrators regarding female seclusion as barriers to the “civilizing mission” of empire, wearing the veil inevitably became a form of resistance to foreign conquest. In the West, its symbolic charge is far from being depleted. It may justly be regarded as a symbol of patriarchal oppression, but like punk and other urban styles, it can also mean a deliberate rejection of the current cultural norms imposed on women of every age, shape, appearance and size.

Witness to Horror

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Charles Simic

Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War
by Mark Danner

Now that independent war correspondents are nearly an extinct species and we fight wars with fewer and fewer images of destruction and carnage shown on television or in newspapers, it's worth recalling that there was a time when this wasn't so. Before the Pentagon established the policy of embedding reporters with our armed forces--thus restricting their movement and making it harder for images and reports that do not fit the official narrative to appear--war correspondents were more or less on their own in war-torn countries, reporting what they saw and drawing their own conclusions. It was an extremely dangerous line of work. Between 1991 and 2001, forty-three journalists died in the Balkans, which is fewer than in Iraq, where between 2003 and 2009, 145 were killed in crossfire, suicide bombings, and premeditated murders by various participants in the conflict who didn't want reporters poking their noses where they shouldn't.

The Google Books Settlement: An Exchange with the Authors Guild

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Roy Blount, Jr.

Upright Hubris: A Short Tale of Skyscrapers

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:45:00 -0800

Ingrid D. Rowland

The shadow of the Burj Khalifa over downtown Dubai (Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images)

If the Earth has never been shy about proclaiming the instability of its surface, the creature misnamed Homo sapiens has never been shy about ignoring the message. Dubai’s 828 meter-tall Burj Khalifa skyscraper, which opened in early January, is only the latest in a millennial series of contenders for the title of world’s tallest building. It looms, at least for now, above Malaysia’s Petronas Towers, Toronto’s CN Tower, Chicago’s Sears Tower, and the quaintly venerable Empire State Building in that proverbial city of towers, New York. Yet the profile of Burj Khalifa suggests nothing so much as a seventeenth-century engraving intended to ridicule the human habit of tower-building, part of the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s exquisitely illustrated essay on the Tower of Babel, Turris Babel of 1679.

Kircher was interested in nearly everything, including the length of the Biblical cubit, and the Tower of Babel was one of his points of reference for establishing precisely what that length might have been. But Kircher’s image calls into question more than the measure of the cubit. Officially, for a Jesuit father in Rome in 1679, Earth’s proper place was the center of the universe—a locus from which it could not be easily dislodged. But his picture illustrates how an overly massive tower would have done just that. In the foreground we see a Tower of Babel reaching from the sphere of the Earth up to scrape the sphere of the Moon (COELUM LUNAE); fluttering around its upper reaches are versions of Genesis 11:4 —“Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven”—in six languages (Latin, Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic, all of which Kircher knew). The two long boxed captions on either side of the tower, meanwhile, explain the background image: it shows (as per the “Note to the Reader” in the left-hand panel) that a tower of that height “when balanced against the earthly globe … greatly exceeds the weight of the earthly globe itself.” Hence Planet Earth hangs dramatically on a chain from the center of gravity that would obtain for a combination of Earth plus moon-scraping tower.

But how can the center of the universe be knocked off center? As the right-hand panel helpfully remarks, “These results are absurd,” enumerating reasons that include “the movement of the earthly globe out of its center would bring on the ruin of all nature below”, “the Sun and the Moon could no longer illuminate the earthly globe”, and “No one could exist on the Earth except in a violent state.” In truth, the more we examine it, the more Kircher’s whole page looks like a colossal phallic joke—especially from a man who also wrote obsessively about obelisks. If we listen carefully we can probably still hear the old trickster, nearly eighty when this book was published, cackling with delight.

The phallic nature of towers has never been subject to much doubt. Medieval Italian cities bristled with them, each one symbolizing, with what the Greek poet Pindar called (in another phallic context) “upright hubris,”* a powerful family or clan. Bologna at the time of Dante in the early fourteenth century was as full of skyscrapers as New York.

Difficult to access and structurally unsound, the upper reaches of these structures served no real purpose other than ostentation and were wasteful in the extreme (perhaps Father Kircher was right after all about living in a violent state). They embodied the kind of destructive feuding that we see in the Verona of Romeo and Juliet, they cost inordinate amounts of money, and they came tumbling down with disconcerting frequency in a terrain riddled with the craters of ancient volcanoes and crisscrossed by fault lines. Verona’s towers crashed to earth in a medieval earthquake. The sudden change in color at a certain level of Siena’s Mangia tower marks an eighteenth-century collapse. The Campanile that dominates Piazza San Marco in Venice is a modern reconstruction; the original crumbled to a heap in 1902.

Why, then, do we keep building to such heights? To be sure, it is in the nature of phallic things (symbols included) to try, try, and try again, just as it is in the nature of primates, among other artists, to imitate all that they admire, including marvelous tall majesties like mountains and trees. But ultimately, as Father Kircher suggested, there are physical limits to the most ingenious human striving. As more and more women join the ranks of practicing architects, as well as the ranks of those who commission architecture, perhaps we will see a change in the ideal form of buildings and cities. (For one example, see Jeanne Gang’s new wind-baffling, undulating skyscraper in Chicago.) Certainly the great architectural matrons of the Italian Baroque era, like the Neapolitan princess Isabella Feltria della Rovere, wasted no time erecting towers—instead, while her feckless husband languished in debtor’s prison, she poured her fortune into the great marble-encrusted Jesuit Church of Gesù Nuovo, reserving a place for her own tomb at the high altar. That, at least, was an architectural scheme that the Jesuit Father Athanasius Kircher would have endorsed with wholehearted enthusiasm.

∗ Pindar, Pythian Ode 10.36, referring to the donkeys of the legendary Hyperboreans: γελᾷ θ᾽ ὁρῶν ὕβριν ὀρθίαν κνωδάλων Apollo “laughs, seeing the upright hubris of the beasts.”

The Warhol Foundation on Trial

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Joel Wachs

A Deal with the Taliban?

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Ahmed Rashid

My Life with the Taliban
by Abdul Salam Zaeef, translated from the Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn

For thirty years Afghanistan has cast a long, dark shadow over world events, but it has also been marked by pivotal moments that could have brought peace and changed world history.

Jaipur

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:21:00 -0800

Max Rodenbeck

Musicians Aditya Bhasin and Nimai at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2009; photograph by Wasfia Nazreen

Perhaps it was the squirrels and peacocks leaping in the foliage overhead. Or maybe the way the rambling grounds of the Diggi Palace divided into separate tableaux—here Gulzar, a venerated Urdu poet, recited before a rapt audience, there a pair of London publishers toasted a trio of hard drinking and smoking Kashmiris, while over on the lawn tablas thumped and sittars whined. All this made it hard not to feel like a figure in an outsized miniature, such as those late paintings of the great durbars of the Raj, in which suited British officers faced off against far more splendidly plumed native rulers. Yet the Jaipur Literature Festival, now in its fifth year, is determinedly void of pomp and hierarchy.

With all events free, and plenty of music to relieve the droning of authors, it is a thoroughly cheerful jamboree, attended by giggling schoolkids, Bollywood houris, bearded ideologues and bookish aunties. With Indian power surging in literature as in industry, the festival reflects auspicious celestial shifts, too. Literary stardom seems no longer to be, as it was until recently for all but a few Indian writers, something conferred in London or New York. India’s most famous writers, and especially those who write in English, still tend to live abroad. But they face a rising challenge from those who have remained at home, where the my-funny-Indian-family trope has happily been dumped in favor of hard-hitting investigative reporting from the likes of Basharat Peer on Kashmir, or the team of Tehelka magazine exposing the brutality of police tactics for crushing Maoist insurgents; scouring social criticism from resurgently angry Dalit, or Untouchable writers such as Kancha Ilaiah, Omprakash Valmiki and Des Taj Kali; and teen-bloggers’ exposes of high-class high jinks from young writers such as Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, Anjum Hassan, and Ira Trivedi. Chetan Bhagat, a Mumbai investment banker-turned-cult novelist, recently scored a first, selling in India alone over a million copies in English of his One Night @ The Call Center.

Much of the fun, as well as the utility of the five-day event, stems from its blending of overseas writing with a subcontinental range that extends from India’s own plethora of native literatures to those of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet—and this year, even the quaintly remote Kingdom of Bhutan. HS Narula, a construction mogul who sponsors the festival, gave a further boost to regional writing with the surprise announcement that, starting next year, he plans to fund a $50,000 annual prize for South Asian literature.

Namita Gokhale, one of the festival’s co-founders and driving spirits, says that from the very beginning she has sought to avoid its becoming some kind of literature-themed Club Med for frolicking Westerners. In a fortuitous division of responsibilities, Gokhale, herself a prolific writer as well as a publisher, seeks out representative talent from nearby, while the ebullient William Dalrymple, now permanently resident in Delhi, devotes his Tigger-ishly infectious energy to bringing in the best from abroad. This year their combined effort has resulted in well over 200 writers and performers, together with some 20,000—mostly Indian—visitors. The quality and variety made for painful choices about simultaneous events: Claire Tomalin on the art of biography or Michael Frayn reminiscing on his travels? A session highlighting writers from Rajasthan or another on Gujarat? A showcase for the latest Indian chick-lit, chaired by Chetan Bhagat, or a discussion of the Kama Sutra?

An evening performance during the 2010 Jaipur Literature Festival; photo by Teamwork

There were some exalted moments. Alexander McCall Smith, a rumpled and witty literary maharaja sitting haloed in white hair, explained his prodigious output as the result of rising before dawn and turning out two to three thousand words a day in a sort of mildly dissociative trance. Roberto Calasso, now completing the seventh volume of his encyclopedic evocation of ancient myth, sounded a note of ecstasy that echoed the previous night’s chanting of Sufi qawalis with the pronouncement that “Reading and writing are perhaps the last access left to us to meet with the gods.”

In a starkly utilitarian counterpoint, Lawrence Wright amused a different audience by emptying his backpack to reveal the tools of trade that helped build his Looming Tower, including a fearsomely voluminous legal-pad-sized list of contacts, the slow perusal of which served to intimidate recalcitrant interviewees into squealing, “because they felt surrounded.” Amit Chauduri spoke of writing paragraph by paragraph, seeking form, shape and compression in each, before moving on, while Vikram Chandra spoke about the universality of the detective story, whose formulaic quest has become, in the modern world, “a secular version of the search for meaning.”

Meanwhile, Tina Brown, a Jaipur regular, regaled a lawn-full of celebrity-spotters with tales of Princess Diana, and Niall Fergusson appeared with his date Ayan Hirsi Ali, who shared her own tell-all tales of the wickedness of Islam. There were huddles of uniformed schoolchildren, too, to flatter lesser lights with indiscriminately sweet demands for autographs. The talk that permeated the festival, though, was about how to sustain it in the future without losing its relaxed intimacy, or turning it into a tourist attraction. Gokhale and Dalrymple, who are backed by funding from Narula’s DSC Limited, insist that it will stay in the appealingly unpretentious Diggi Palace, and remain open to all. Let’s hope so.

Europe's New Walls

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:00:00 -0800

Timothy Snyder

Along the Berlin Wall, West Berlin, 1961 (Rene Burri/Magnum Photos)

I’m not sure if I was in Lithuania one recent evening—and it wasn’t the sweet Russian champagne. My wandering started in the village of Krasnogruda in northeastern Poland, home to the poet Czesław Miłosz’s mother, and only about a mile from the Lithuanian border. As the full moon rose and the pines turned blue under their weight of snow, I might have crossed into Lithuania. Or perhaps not. Not so very long ago this invisible border was the western frontier of the Soviet Union, perhaps the most heavily guarded in the world. When I first came to eastern Europe in 1990, it was triply patrolled: by a Poland just emerging from Communism, by a Lithuania not quite yet independent, and by a Soviet Union that still in some measure existed. Today Poland and Lithuania are both democracies within the European Union, and their shared border, unmarked for almost all of its length, is all but invisible.

The revolutions of 1989, the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the enlargements of the European Union to the east in 2004 and 2007 have extended the zone of free movement and economic exchange in Europe, and brought new liberties to ten formerly communist countries, of which three—including Lithuania—were former republics of the Soviet Union itself. The sense of borderlessness I experienced between Poland and Lithuania is quietly repeated hundreds of thousands or millions of times every day by EU citizens and tourists; in much of Europe, the old borders have become a distant memory.

Yet, while attending several celebratory conferences over the last few months about the revolutions of 1989, I found myself thinking about the new walls that have risen within and around Europe. The same Schengen agreements that create a zone of free internal movement for all but a few EU members require the construction and defense of a single external European frontier. This is as it must be; but with the result that someone from beyond the zone, from Belarus or from Turkey, may find herself refused entry. The difference between not needing a passport at all and needing a special visa is considerable, and creates a distance that can be psychologically and politically damaging.

Europe itself seems much further from the United States than it did twenty years ago. In western Europe, the election of Obama has undone some of the feeling of estrangement that resulted from the American decision to invade Iraq; while in some east European countries, such as Poland, Obama sometimes takes the blame for the weakened American position in world affairs. In the meantime European and American society have become increasingly incomprehensible to one another. Standards of living in several west and central European countries are now much better than in America. I did not expect twenty years ago that poor Poland could become so quickly comparable to the United States in its infant mortality rates and life expectancy. Its downtowns feel safer and its public transportation is better. Although Poles and other east Europeans are more likely than West Europeans to repeat the rhetoric of economic libertarianism, they accept the fundamentals of the welfare state that in America are now so contested. It is no easier to explain American debates over health care reform in Warsaw than in Vienna.

A forest along Poland’s border with Lithuania, near Krasnogruda, Poland, January 2010; photograph by Timothy Snyder

Yet all is far from well within Europe. In much of central and eastern Europe, nationalist populism—whether in Russia, Poland, Hungary, or Austria—is more resonant than twenty years ago. Throughout the continent, pedagogical systems have remained national, or, in such cases as Russia and Ukraine, become so. Young people in almost every European school system learn versions of history more appropriate for the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. The very progress of political integration in Europe has created, ironically, new nationalist temptations for politicians such as Václav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, or Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia.

In these and other new member states of the European Union, political leaders once restrained by their countries’ efforts to join the European Union now feel free to do as they like. The weakness of the national state in many places inclines politicians to use what power they have to revive national anxieties and symbols. Hungary and Slovakia managed last year to engage in a highly emotional dispute over border crossings, even though their common border is no longer even guarded. Poland and Ukraine patrol their national history with powerful memory institutes, just at a time when the opening of archives should allow these countries’ pasts to be considered within a broader European setting. Overlaying it all is the unfortunate international culture of “memory,” which under a deceptive sheen of tolerance is often nothing more than the resuscitation of narcissistic myths of national exceptionalism and martyrdom.

That evening in Krasnogruda, my cell phone thought I was in Lithuania. The radio waves also created a new kind of barrier. Over these past few months, when I visited exhibitions of photographs taken of the revolutionaries of 1989 in Warsaw or Prague or Timisoara or Leipzig, I could not help, from the perspective of today, but see them this way: as people not concerned that a sudden vibration in their pockets might call them to order. There was no email waiting on a computer that might be more important than the sights before their eyes. Life was not elsewhere. Email and wireless certainly aided oppositionists in Belgrade in 2000, Kiev in 2004, and Teheran in 2009. The point is not that technology must be conservative, rather just that changes in technology can mark, rather quickly, a boundary between one epoch and the next. It is no doubt romantic to say so, but the revolutions of 1989 had a human character that may not be possible to replicate today.

What Beijing Fears Most

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:04:00 -0800

Perry Link

Villagers from Guangdong province protesting the construction of a garbage incinerator, Guangzhou, China, January 25, 2010 (William Foreman/AP Images)

On December 29, four days after being sentenced to eleven years in prison for “subversion of state power,” the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo filed an appeal to a higher court. For many familiar with the Chinese regime, the decision seemed quixotic: it is extremely unlikely that a higher court will overturn the sentence, which aims at Liu’s support for Charter 08 and his writings on human rights, democracy, and rule of law in China. Yet Liu’s response to his sentence—and that of a number of Chinese intellectuals over the past few weeks—suggests that the Charter 08 movement continues to survive, despite extraordinary efforts by the Chinese government to repress it.

Friends and supporters of Liu were generally startled at the length of the sentence. Fellow writer Li Jie, for example, wrote that “I expected [the authorities] might want to play down the issue—give Liu a one-year sentence, declare that he’d already served it [because he had already been held without trial for a year], let him go home, and move on. I really did not imagine that they would be as feeble-minded as this.” Among Charter 08’s supporters, there is little doubt where the eleven-year sentence originated; such a decision could be made only by the government’s most senior leaders. But no one has a good answer for why eleven seemed the right number. (The maximum under the law was fifteen years.) One theory that has spread on the Chinese Internet is that eleven years is 4,018 days, and Charter 08 contains 4,024 Chinese characters. So: one day for each character you wrote, Mr. Liu, and we’ll waive the last six.

If the purpose of the harsh sentence was to intimidate others, it has not worked well. Hundreds of signers of Charter 08 have endorsed an additional statement declaring that if Liu Xiaobo is guilty then we are, too. Cui Weiping, a film scholar (and translator of Vaclav Havel into Chinese), spent the days following the announcement of Liu’s sentence conducting a telephone survey of more than 100 prominent Chinese intellectuals, including both signers and non-signers of Charter 08, on how they viewed the sentence. Finding almost unanimous disgust, she collected her findings under the heading “We Give Up on Nothing” and published them in a series of twitter feeds that circulated widely in China and abroad—even to my computer in California. Until now, the authorities have not been able to stop her.

Cui quotes Zhang Sizhi, a senior lawyer, who wonders how the once “great, glorious, and correct Communist Party” could now be so “manipulative, petty, and selfish.” Wang Lixiong, a leading writer and advocate of peace with the Tibetans, said the best way to support Liu Xiaobo is to continue to work for his cause, until “society is changed and everyone in it is free.” Liang Xiaoyan, a well-known editor, said the sentence shows that while some things in China have changed radically in the last thirty years, other things “haven’t budged, and there is not the slightest impulse [at the top] to budge them.” The eminent historian Yu Ying-shih, reached at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, noted that this was the third time in twenty years that China’s rulers have sent Liu Xiaobo to political prison, and “each time has been more glorious than the last.”

No one in Cui’s survey sided with the government, but some did equivocate, and, with their permission, Cui records their comments as well. Mo Yan, one of China’s leading novelists, said, “I’m not clear on the details, and would rather not comment. I have guests at home right now and am busy.”

On Liu’s own opinion of his sentence, we have the following written statement, relayed from prison by his lawyers, on December 29, the same day he decided to appeal:

The sentence violates the Chinese constitution and international human rights covenants. It cannot bear moral scrutiny and will not pass the test of history. I believe that my work has been just, and that someday China will be a free and democratic country. Our people then will bathe in the sunshine of freedom from fear. I am paying a price to move us in that direction, but without the slightest regret. I have long been aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison. Now I am taking that step; and true freedom is that much nearer.

Liu Xiaobo

Some have questioned Liu’s determination to appeal. If the legal process in cases like his is only window-dressing, as everyone knows it is, isn’t he lending credibility to a public fraud by suggesting that it could be subject to a legitimate remedy through the Chinese judicial system? In response to this sort of criticism, Liu’s close friend Jiang Qisheng, a physicist and another drafter of Charter 08, has written an essay for China Human Rights Defenders arguing that “in my view, Liu probably asked for an appeal simply in order to leave the most complete of possible historical records. What happens when a citizen stands up to a tyrannical dictatorship? Here’s what happens—in every detail, start to finish.” By appealing, Jiang suggests, Liu does not support the public fraud but further exposes it.

Others who support Liu see the eleven-year sentence—as unjust and egregious as it is—as helping the cause of Charter 08, especially outside China. Far more than before, Liu and his situation now resemble that of Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela. On January 19, Havel, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and eight others published a statement urging that Liu be considered for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. When China’s rulers determined such a heavy sentence, despite international appeals for Liu’s release, and chose to announce it on Christmas Day, some foreign leaders may finally have come—as Liu’s supporters see it—to a more accurate view of the nature of the Chinese regime. The difference between Hillary Clinton in February 2009 (human rights, she said, must not “interfere” with larger issues in the Sino-American relationship) and the same Ms. Clinton this month (China’s Internet censors are a “threat…to our civil society”) may not be wholly attributable to the Liu Xiaobo trial—the recent comments followed Google’s announcement that the Chinese government has been interfering with its servers. But might it have helped?

Still, the nub of the Charter 08 battle remains at home, not abroad. There is much evidence that the ideas of the Charter—upholding the letter of China’s constitution and respecting human and civil rights—appeal to the Chinese people who get to see it, but the government has been quite successful in blocking the Charter’s spread. About 10,000 people have now signed, and were there not widespread fear about the consequences, no doubt hundreds of thousands of others who know about the Charter would sign as well. Even if the crypto-Chartists number as many as a million, however, that is less than 0.1 percent of China’s population. The apparent intensity with which China’s rulers despise Charter 08 cannot be attributed to a threat from that 0.1 percent. It must come from a deeper worry that the Charter 08 movement might someday tap into, and give shape to, the very broad and deep currents of discontent that have been coursing through Chinese society.

In recent times, unrest in China has occurred over issues such as corruption, official privilege, land confiscation, tainted food products, and air and water pollution; thanks to the Internet, such problems may now draw tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of protesters, and the resultant uproars have sometimes forced the hands of officialdom. Deng Yujiao, a waitress who stabbed a drunken official to death as he was trying to rape her in May 2009, would surely have faced execution in the days before the Internet. But after tens of millions of Web-users took her side and voiced their outrage online, a court found she had acted in self-defense and ordered her release. Until now, such groundswells of protest have not linked themselves to more sweeping demands for government reform. What Beijing fears most is a marriage between manifestos and the masses; if protesters at this level were someday armed with Charter 08, the men who rule China could face a challenge of truly nightmarish scale.

Aio!

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:23:00 -0800

Ingrid D. Rowland

Italian Senate President Amintore Fanfani getting his ears pulled at a memorial for former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, Rome, 1979

Given their long personal histories of accessibility, and Italian society’s general focus on physical presence as an essential part of life (the chic version of this phenomenon is presenzialismo, the art of showing up in all the right places), Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Pope Benedict XVI have always run a certain degree of bodily risk in their positions; the fact that they were both assaulted last month—Berlusconi wounded in the face by a sculpture-wielding psychotic and the Pope jumped at by a woman at a Christmas Eve mass—was thus a matter of chance rather than any greater design, divine or human. Furthermore, violent attacks on public figures are a recurring story in Italian history, to say nothing of ancient Rome: King Umberto I was knifed by one anarchist, Giovanni Passanante, in 1878, and fatally shot by another, Gaetano Bresci, in 1900. Former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped in March 1978 by the Red Brigades and murdered the following May after 55 excruciating days in a “People’s Prison.”

Massimo Tartaglia’s assault on Berlusconi and Susanna Maiolo’s on Pope Benedict clearly fall into a different category of event, just as they also differ from the intentionally murderous attempts on King Umberto’s life; both December attackers were notably troubled souls. Still, this is the second time that Berlusconi has been hit by a flying object (and around Christmas time): on New Year’s Eve of 2004 an Italian tourist winged him with a camera tripod at the Christmas fair in Rome’s Piazza Navona. Like most populist politicians, he excites strong emotions, and responds emotionally himself (a videotape of the tripod incident records the Prime Minister’s audible “Aio!”—Italian for “Ouch!”).

Whatever the disturbances that otherwise trouble his mind, Berlusconi’s attacker chose his weapon carefully; from an arsenal that included a small quartz sculpture of Milan’s cathedral, pepper spray, and a long shard of Plexiglas, he chose the spiky image that stands for Milan as surely as the Colosseum stands for Rome. The real cathedral’s Gothic spires were largely erected in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the rest of Italy had long since embraced the Classical aesthetic of the Renaissance, and Berlusconi has built his political career by exploiting that same stubborn resistance to Rome and all it means. (Ironically, a model Colosseum, with its gently rounded classical lines, would have inflicted far less damage.) As the victim observed himself, he was undone in, and by, his very own city, “la mia Milano,” a fact that upset him as much as the evident proof that he is not universally loved (not to mention the fact that the difference of a few centimeters could have made his injuries truly devastating rather than disconcerting).

Tartaglia also struck some ancient Roman chords that vibrate as deeply in Silvio Berlusconi’s Lombard heart as they might in any native Roman’s: in effect, the Prime Minister is a modern Tribune of the People, that remarkable Roman institution set up in the early days of the Republic to defend the interests of the lower classes. Tribunes came from the plebs rather than the senatorial class, the “patricians,” and to safeguard their fellow plebeians they could stop any law passed by the Roman Senate simply by shouting “Veto!”—“I forbid it!” Their persons were sacrosanct, which meant that any physical violence against them would unleash a dreadful curse.

Berlusconi, who based his financial fortune on lowbrow television and his political fortune on the image of a self-made man, is a natural parallel to a tribune, as was the fourteenth-century Roman notary, Cola di Rienzo (“Nick Lawrence”), who led a rebellion against the rule of the Popes in 1347, and set himself up on the Capitoline Hill with the title Tribune of Rome.

Yet despite their sacrosanct status, Roman tribunes were assaulted repeatedly over the course of the centuries, beginning with the reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, slain by thugs in the Forum for daring to push for plebeian property rights. Fifteen centuries later, when a few years in power had made that latter-day Tribune of the People Cola di Rienzo fat and greedy, he was assassinated, like Julius Caesar, by his own associates, who directed their first dagger blow at his pot belly. Massimo Tartaglia aimed his model cathedral with similar accuracy at Berlusconi’s smiling face, the image that distills the man as succinctly as a paunch summed up Cola the Tribune. Berlusconi, bloodied and shaken, took the attack for some time as a personal affront. Although he is fond of levity, this hurt was too intense for him to make light of it.

Berlusconi is not the famously unflappable Giulio Andreotti. Nor does he have the cool, acerbic wit of Amintore Fanfani, the late Christian Democratic politican, economic historian, and five-time prime minister. In 1979, at a memorial Mass for Aldo Moro, a disgruntled fellow Christian Democrat came up behind Fanfani (who was then Senate President) and pulled his ears—the punishment proverbially meted out to naughty schoolboys— all the while shouting, “You’re soft on Communism!” It was generally assumed that the stunt-which was caught on film—had originated at a higher level within the Christian Democratic party (and that Gallo had hoped to advance his own career). As political theatre, however, the stunt ended up working entirely in favor of the tweaked rather than the tweaker. By the next morning, Fanfani had plastered Rome with posters saying “Look who risks his ears for you.” And since the occasion for the display was the memorial Mass for Aldo Moro (yet another Christian Democrat), it served as a reminder that Fanfani, alone among the members of his party, had pushed for negotiating with the Red Brigades for Moro’s release.

Modern Prime Ministers and Senators are not officially sacrosanct, but Popes surely are. Susanna Maiolo did not want to attack Benedict XVI so much as command his attention, but that call for attention, at the opening procession of a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, knocked down both the elderly Pope and the even more elderly Cardinal Etchegarray, snapping the latter’s hip. Benedict was able to pick himself up and carry on with the liturgy. He has drawn no sweeping conclusions about society or his papacy from the incident, and if he has misgivings about the state of security in the Vatican, he has not proclaimed them to the outside world. In other words, as Italian columnist Curzio Maltese wrote last week, the Pope has acted like a mature adult. In these parlous times, that in itself is a small miracle.

Forever Putin?

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Amy Knight

Bez Putina: Politicheskie Dialogi s Yevgeniem Kiselevym (Without Putin: Political Dialogues with Yevgeny Kiselev)
by Mikhail Kasyanov

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War
by Stephen F. Cohen

How long will Vladimir Putin last? It is hard to imagine Russia without its steely-eyed, iron-fisted, and hugely popular prime minister, especially since he has hinted so broadly that he might run again for the Russian presidency when the term of his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, expires in 2012. Starting in that year, the Russian presidential term will extend from four to six years (a change introduced by Medvedev) and Putin would legally be allowed to serve two more terms. This means he could conceivably be Russia's leader until May 2024, when he would be seventy-one years old.

The "Devastating" Decision

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:00:00 -0800

Ronald Dworkin

David Bosse, president of Citizens United, posing with the group’s advocacy videos (Lucian Perkins/Washington Post/Getty Images)

Against the opposition of their four colleagues, five right-wing Supreme Court justices have now guaranteed that big corporations can spend unlimited funds on political advertising in any political election. In an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, the Court overruled established precedents and declared dozens of national and state statutes unconstitutional, including the McCain-Feingold Act, which forbade corporate or union television advertising that endorses or opposes a particular candidate.

This appalling decision, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was quickly denounced by President Obama as “devastating”; he said that it “strikes at our democracy itself.” In his State of the Union speech of January 27, he said, “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” He is right: the decision will further weaken the quality and fairness of our politics.

The Court has given lobbyists, already much too powerful, a nuclear weapon. Some lawyers have predicted that corporations will not take full advantage of it: they will want to keep their money for their business. But that would still permit carefully targeted threats. What legislator tempted to vote for health care reform or Obama’s banking reorganization would be indifferent to the prospect that his reelection campaign could be swamped in a tsunami of expensive negative advertising? How many corporations fearful of environmental or product liability litigation would pass up the chance to tip the balance in a state judicial election?

On the most generous understanding the decision displays the five justices’ instinctive favoritism of corporate interests. But some commentators, including The New York Times, have suggested a darker interpretation. The five justices may have assumed that allowing corporations to spend freely against candidates would favor Republicans; perhaps they overruled long-established laws and precedents out of partisan zeal. If so, their decision would stand beside the Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore as an unprincipled political act with terrible consequences for the nation.

We should notice not just the bad consequences of the decision, however, but the poor quality of the arguments Justice Kennedy offered to defend it. The conservative justices savaged canons of judicial restraint they themselves have long praised. Chief Justice Roberts takes every opportunity to repeat what he said, under oath, in his Senate nomination hearings: that the Supreme Court should avoid declaring any statute unconstitutional unless it cannot decide the case before it in any other way. Now consider how shamelessly he and the other justices who voted with the majority ignored that constraint in their haste to declare the McCain-Feingold Act unconstitutional in time for the coming midterm elections.

Citizens United, a small nonprofit corporation almost entirely financed by individual contributions, had made a very negative film about Hillary Clinton. It asked the Court only to rule that its method of distributing that film, on a video-on-demand service, was not outlawed by the Act. It offered several arguments, some of them plausible, for interpreting the Act that way. So the Court did not have to decide whether to overrule the Act: it could have agreed with Citizens United while reserving that larger question. But after they first heard arguments in the case, the five justices declared that they wanted, on their own initiative, to consider declaring the Act unconstitutional. They introduced that unnecessary issue themselves and then scheduled an emergency special hearing during the summer so that they could strike down the statute as quickly as possible.

Justice Kennedy, in his opinion for the 5-4 majority, tried to explain why that was necessary. It would have been possible, he conceded, to interpret the McCain-Feingold Act’s prohibition of corporate “broadcast, cable, or satellite” electioneering that is “publicly distributed” as not applying to video-on-demand TV. But he declined this strategy because transmission technology could be expected to change, so that the Court would be required to revisit the issue time and time again. He did not explain why the Court could not have drafted a general principle interpreting the statute to guide future decisions as technology develops, as it has in so many other cases. For example, the Court’s doctrine of “reasonable expectation of privacy” is designed to adapt to evolving technology of surveillance and spying.

The conservative justices also had to overrule two of the Court’s prior decisions—its 1990 Austin and 2003 McConnell decisions. In his Senate hearings, Roberts declared his great respect for judicial precedent: he said that just because he thought that an earlier Court decision had been wrongly decided or poorly argued would be no reason to overrule it. It would have to have proved unworkable or its basis in principle would have to have been eroded by other intervening decisions. Kennedy offered no evidence that restrictions on corporate electioneering had proved unworkable, which is not surprising because such restrictions had been in place since 1907.

Instead he argued that the two decisions were themselves inconsistent with other precedents. But as Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out in his long and impressive dissenting opinion, Kennedy was able to cite only one past decision actually to that point: the Court’s 1978 Bellotti decision, in which it in fact denied what Kennedy takes it to have held. “Our consideration of a corporation’s right to speak on issues of general public interest,” the Court stated in that case, “implies no comparable right in the quite different context of participation in a political campaign for election to public office.” Kennedy disregarded that clear statement because, he said, it occurred in “a single footnote.” But that is a natural place for a clarification; and Kennedy’s suggested distinction between text and note is entirely novel. Some of the Court’s footnotes have proved much more important than the decisions to which they were attached.

The main theoretical flaw in Kennedy’s opinion is different, however. The opinion announces and perpetuates a shallow, simplistic understanding of the First Amendment, one that actually undermines one of the most basic purposes of free speech, which is to protect democracy. The nerve of his argument—-that corporations must be treated like real people under the First Amendment—is in my view preposterous. Corporations are legal fictions. They have no opinions of their own to contribute and no rights to participate with equal voice or vote in politics.

Kennedy’s opinion left Americans very little room to protect themselves against this further degradation of their democracy. But it did leave some. He acknowledged that the ruling does not prevent Congress from requiring reasonable disclosures and disclaimers in corporate advertising. I believe Congress should require a prominent statement in every such ad disclosing any corporate sponsors and declaring that their support represents the opinion of the corporation’s officers, who have a duty to promote the corporation’s own interests, and not necessarily the opinion of any of their shareholders who are actually paying for the ad.

I hope to discuss this and other suggestions for legislation—as well as the poor quality of the arguments offered by Justice Kennedy, and the potential consequences of the decision—in more detail in a future issue of The New York Review.

—Updated January 28, 2010

Slide Show: Luc Tuymans

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:02:00 -0800

In “Gray Magic,” from the February 11 issue of The New York Review, Sanford Schwartz writes about the Luc Tuymans retrospective, which will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 6 to May 2. (It originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and will travel on to Dallas, Chicago, and Brussels; the catalog is edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth.) Below is a slide show of images from the exhibition, accompanied by excerpts from Schwartz’s review.

Podcast: Cathleen Schine on How Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:16:25 -0800

Cathleen Schine speaks with Sasha Weiss about Gail Collins's book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present and about the victories and failures of the women's movement. To read Schine's article, "Growing Up Female" please visit http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23490

Podcast: Cathleen Schine on Gail Collins Cathleen Schine speaks...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:16:00 -0800

Podcast: Cathleen Schine on Gail Collins

Cathleen Schine speaks with Sasha Weiss about Gail Collins’s book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, and about the victories and failures of the women’s movement.

Haiti's Hidden Hope

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:59:00 -0800

Mark L. Schneider

A Haitian policeman detaining looters in Port-au-Prince, January 21, 2010 (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

The colossal earthquake that struck Haiti last week raises a profound and recurring question for this fragile nation. As they bury over 100,000 dead—some of them in mass graves—and more than a million survivors seek water, food, shelter and medicines, can Haitians ever move beyond mere survival to build a more viable state? For a nation battered by two centuries of misrule, divided by garish contrasts between rich and poor, stripped of its forests, victimized annually by vicious hurricanes, built astride a ghastly seismic fault-line and situated on a favored route for cocaine traffickers, one may well conclude that misery here is endemic.

Yet it is one of the terrible ironies of this latest calamity—the worst natural disaster in the history of the Western hemisphere—that in the year preceding the earthquake, Haiti had made considerable progress. Just last year, I sat in the now destroyed presidential palace with President René Préval as we discussed the need to move quickly on training and vetting new judges and relieving the pressures on vastly overcrowded jails. President Préval, who was elected in 2006 with broad popular support, initiated reforms of the police forces and judiciary, with some success. Following last year’s hurricane, the government was able to forge a national consensus on a recovery plan emphasizing rapid creation of jobs in industries benefiting from special U.S. trade offers and tourism, primary education, sustainable small-scale farming, and rural development. These little noted achievements could—if resurrected—provide the beginnings of a new Haiti.

As the world begins to shift its attention from rescue to reconstruction, simply establishing security will be a huge challenge: some looters already are being shot or lynched, barely half of the nascent Haitian Police Force (HNP) is working, penitentiary walls have buckled and prisoners are on the loose, and fear of violence among citizens is increasing. Making Haiti safe again depends not only on getting Haitian and international police onto the streets, but on enforcing rule of law in a country where the judiciary and penitentiary system barely functioned even before the January 12 earthquake.

Initially, much of the task of providing relief and law and order to the thousands of homeless in Port-au-Prince and other areas will fall to international forces. Despite the tragic loss of so many lives of UN officials who were trapped in the UN’s Haiti compound during the earthquake, the UN Security Council has reaffirmed its commitment by authorizing another 3,500 troops and UN police for the country, bringing the totals of its Brazilian-led peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) to nearly 9,000 troops and more than 3,500 police. The US has some 13,500 soldiers, sailors, and airmen positioned on the ground, and five ships including an aircraft carrier off Haiti’s coasts or on the way. The Dominican Republic has plans to send 800 troops to meet the MINUSTAH request and the region’s other nations are following suit. Canada has promised 1,000 troops and the EU is deploying 150 officers of its new European Gendarmerie Force.

Adding to the challenge of coordinating this ad hoc coalition is the complex and often chaotic nature of urban life in Haiti, which has frustrated the efforts of foreign peacekeepers before. Without the close cooperation of the Haitian government and the Creole-speaking and street-wise HNP police in the lead, it will be difficult to contain spoilers—particularly in places like the sprawling inner city of Cite Soleil.

Yet much could be learned by building on the changes in Haiti that were initiated—with UN help—before the earthquake. After coming to office, the Préval government had begun a serious effort to reform the police force, having stripped its ranks of many human rights violators and those on the take. (One indication of the challenge it faces is that the 2009 police academy classes graduated without weapons training because guns and bullets were not available for the shooting range.) While this reform was still incomplete, before the earthquake a poll showed nearly 60 percent of Haiti’s citizens approved of police performance—a far cry from the security forces that as recently as a few years ago were rightly feared by Haiti’s citizens.

Haiti’s police headquarters and many local stations were destroyed in the earthquake. However, for a force with barely four years under new leadership, getting almost half of its 8,000 police on the streets this week is a remarkable achievement. Many of the police don’t have uniforms because they were lost in the destruction of their own homes. Others are still searching for family members and still others have no weapons. But they are beginning to be visible in Port-au-Prince.

At the same time, the Préval administration had also pushed forward laws to establish a judicial academy, set new standards for existing judges, and authorize an independent oversight council. Along with rebuilding Haiti’s Supreme Court, and naming new judges to that court, these steps must remain high on the priority list. Préval’s earlier plan to reform Haiti’s notorious prisons, the site of appalling over-crowding and rights abuses, must be an equal priority, especially as the police recapture escaped prisoners.

Security for Haiti will not end with reform of the police, courts or jails. It also will require a broader strategy for post-disaster reconstruction and stabilization. This will require an unparalleled international partnership with Haiti, and all donors must put aside national pride and interest for the greater good and support the UN coordination mandate. In this highly fractured and polarized political, economic and social environment, Haitians also must come together in a new social compact that reaches across the country’s broad chasm of class, race, and ideology.

Clearly parliamentary elections planned for February 28 cannot be held. The Haitian government should also consider postponing the presidential election scheduled for November until the country has established greater stability. Combining presidential, parliamentary, and local elections would save money and increase voter turnout in communities still reeling from enormous reconstruction demands. These issues will be addressed at an international meeting in Canada on January 25 and at an international donor’s conference later in the year, but the long-term vision will have to be defined by Haitians themselves.

President René Préval called the social movement that propelled him to an electoral victory in 2006, “L’espoir”—Hope. Today it is that Haitian belief along with “Tèt kolé,” the Haitian Creole appeal for unity, that Haiti and the international community must embrace. Only then will the question of whether Haiti merely survives or emerges from the ruins as a modern nation be answered.

Mark L. Schneider is a Senior Vice President and Special Advisor on Latin America at the International Crisis Group.

Gray Magic

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Sanford Schwartz

Luc Tuymans
an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, September 17, 2009–January 3, 2010; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, February 6–May 2, 2010; the Dallas Museum of Art, June 6–September 5, 2010; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, October 2, 2010–January 9, 2011; and the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, February 10–May 8, 2011.

There is a kind of perverse magic to the art of Luc Tuymans. The Belgian painter, who was born in 1958, has an odd gift for showing the world in disembodied, not always decipherable, and almost always ominous ways. He has made pictures of, among many seemingly disparate things, drops of water, a buttonhole, bloodstains, a child's room, a man driving a car, and pillows. But he has also taken as subjects living and dead figures, and events and places, in the public sphere. Either directly or through inference, he has made paintings of members of the Nazi high command and the concentration camps, and also Belgian rule in the Congo. A suite of works from 2005 entitled Proper included paintings of a black-tie ball, Condoleezza Rice, and a view of a park as seen from a surveillance camera, while other pictures of his show aspects of the Oberammergau Passion Play and the Walt Disney Company.

The Chess Master and the Computer

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Garry Kasparov

Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind
by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated from the Spanish by Deborah Klosky

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.

Yesterday's Man?

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Anne Applebaum

Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
by Michael Scammell

He began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud's. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a 'crazy party' in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn't die (though Benjamin, denied passage into Spain at the French border, took them and did).

After Massachusetts: His Hopes Did Him In

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:18:00 -0800

Garry Wills

During the 2008 primary campaigns, there was a constant muted roar telling Barack Obama to become more aggressive, to answer wild allegations against him, to “stand up to” Hillary Clinton or his other rivals. He rightly saw that would boomerang against him. The last thing he could appear was an angry black man. Harry Reid, with his derided comments in the book Game Change, was basically right. It was helpful that Obama, the first black man with a realistic chance at the presidency, was lighter skinned and better spoken than, say, an Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. He was the anti-Sharpton, not railing against American racism. He was more a Sidney Poitier than a Shirley Chisholm.

He was hopeful, optimistic, patriotic—all necessary qualities in the mold-breaker; he was soothing, not threatening. He promised to unite red and blue states, to end a period of bitter divisiveness in Washington. To many it mattered more that he was the anti-Bush than that he was the anti-Sharpton. A policy of omnidirectional placation had served him well as the editor of the Harvard Law Review, as a community organizer, as a state senator. But the mild manner works only if it removes the threat from a serious purpose. In the presidency, Obama has let the mild manner become the purpose. And with the loss of the Massachusetts Senate race, that purpose—and his ability to act on it—has been put in deep doubt.

In a sense, he swallowed his own Kool-Aid. He worked on the unrealistic assumption that his really was a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state-blue-state America. He spent a year and endless energy in trying to please and recruit the Olympia Snowes and Charles Grassleys and Max Baucuses and Big Pharmacies. He let them dictate the pace and the terms of the health care debate, making it hostage to the virulent town hall meetings of the summer of 2009. They were never going to be his allies. He should have identified them as his foes early on, and attacked them as such.

Instead of saying he would let others give him a health plan, any health plan, he should have said that the health plan he needed and wanted was the public option, and then sold it unceasingly as the only means of bringing down costs—which proved to be the central issue in rejecting less effective compromises. He should have used the stick, not endless carrots, on the blue dogs. He should have recognized that he must get results fast, while he was riding high in the polls. Lyndon Johnson said that if a man comes into office with one thing he wants, he should get it in his first six months. Obama frittered away his striking time.

On foreign policy, though he came to national prominence as a critic of the Iraq war he appointed a secretary of state who had voted for it, a vice president who had voted for it, a secretary of defense who had supported it, and top echelon generals who had waged it. As if to placate them, he substituted a new dumb war for the old dumb one. He has tied down our troops, money, and resources to one government (not really a government) when terrorism has metastasized across many governments and nations—limiting our response to it by the feckless hope of building a viable nation in Afghanistan. He choreographed a great series of listening sessions, where every general had his say in the White House before he tried to please them all. On one of George Bush’s worst excesses, his signing statements nullifying congressional legislation, Obama has substituted a worse recourse, secret signing reservations—allowing him to bypass certain provisions of a bill—that are hard to trace.

He has put off decisions on rendition, on Guantanamo, on CIA interrogation. As if he felt restrained by his own blackness, he will not fight, though the American people love a fighter—Teddy Roosevelt going after the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt mocking the “malefactors of great wealth,” Harry Truman for “giving ‘em hell,” attacking the Do-Nothing Congress and his media foes. Whatever their other faults, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush were applauded when they proved to be fighters. Bush was never apologetic about playing to his base, while Obama has acted as if he were ashamed of his. They are repaying him in kind.

During his campaign, Obama’s critics called him a hope-addict, all rosy scenarios and Let’s-get-along and Kumbaya. It is sad to realize, at last, that they were right. Hope did him in.

The Persistent Pleasures of Eric Rohmer

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:28:00 -0800

Geoffrey O’Brien

Jean-Louis and Maud, from Eric Rohmer’s
My Night at Maud’s (1969)

My immediate response to the news of Eric Rohmer’s death was the keen regret that there would be no more Rohmer films, and thus no more of those surprises he was still, at nearly 90, thoroughly capable of eliciting. Indeed, his last three films (The Lady and the Duke, Triple Agent, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) were among his most surprising, period films that ventured into political tragedy and pastoral comedy in ways that opened up new dimensions in his earlier work. Few filmmakers have been able to develop a body of utterly personal work so deliberately and methodically, and he managed it only with the most extreme budgetary discipline.

That he made small-scale films on small-scale themes (like love and trust and betrayal and self-knowledge) made him seem to many a minor master—words like “soufflé” and “bouquet” had a way of cropping up in descriptions of his films. The very pleasures his movies were full of—pleasures of youth and landscape and leisure, however little pleasure the worry-ridden characters derived from them—seemed perhaps too easeful, too much like relaxation, in the same way that Bonnard’s paintings might once have seemed too luxuriously beautiful.

I think it will become clear that Rohmer was one of a handful of really great filmmakers of the last half-century. I can’t think of a greater. His movies will be seen as aspects of a single enterprise in how they reply to one another and how each further variation deepens the effect of what came before. The rigorousness with which their pleasures are achieved will become more apparent if all the films are seen together. The near-absence of background music in Rohmer’s films has often been remarked on (although on closer examination the work is filled with illuminating fragments of ambient sound, musical and otherwise)—but symphonic underscoring was unnecessary in films so musical in their rhythms. He makes his own music with time itself. Likewise his notoriously dialogue-filled movies, from My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee on, are perhaps most remarkable for their evocation of silence. There is no pause like a Rohmerian pause.

Brialy and Claire, from Claire’s Knee (1970)

Even if there are to be no more of his movies, there will still be surprises. These are works designed cunningly to resist settling into any final form. They change between viewings. In his work with actors, Rohmer created characters who exist beyond the requirements of their particular intrigue—they persist even when offscreen. To go back to, say, Autumn Tale—the last and most elaborate of his masquerades of love—is to wonder again at the ultimate unknowability of those people who seem at the same time so familiar, not least because we may have seen them in other scenes in other corners of the Rohmer universe. Impossible to contemplate Béatrice Romand without having in mind her teenage self in Claire’s Knee almost thirty years earlier, or to imagine Marie Rivière as the ostensibly contented provincial wife without remembering the chronically unhappy Delphine of The Green Ray.

These are performances that seem not to be such, even as Rohmer’s scenarios proclaim their artifice, an artifice that would have worked just as well in the seventeenth century. At any moment in any Rohmer film there is tension between the literary structure of a narrative—even if it turns out to be a narrative in which nothing quite seems finally to have happened—and the filmic there-ness of real people in a real place in real time. In Autumn Tale we are, at any moment, equally absorbed by the twist of a devious plot, the personalities (as gauged from faces and gestures and voices) of people who are in equal measure characters and actors, and the “everything else” in which they exist, embodied by, for instance, a bunch of grapes on the vine, suddenly brought to the center of our attention. The grapes are as important as anything: with time, Rohmer’s films will also be seen as a documentation of mutating or altogether vanishing environments.

Undoubtedly we will learn more about the life that Rohmer worked very hard to keep private, and books will be written to connect the peculiarities and obsessions of the films with biographical data. But the mysteriousness will remain, even more mysterious for springing up in work so marked by rationalism and knowing wit. The banal is finally made strange. The more his characters are plainly revealed the more enigmatic they become. The “green ray” (out of a Jules Verne novel) that brings at least the promise of love at the end of that film (perhaps his most vibrant) is paralleled by the “blue hour” that casts an unearthly spell over the first episode of his lesser-known Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, so cheaply made that at moments it has the air of a home movie. The Latin liturgy that ends Perceval le Gallois (that extraordinary exercise in total translation) rhymes with the French liturgy at the beginning of My Night at Maud’s. Yet nowhere in all this work are we released from endless questioning and doubting—starting with our doubts about our own motivations and desires, not to mention our interpretation of the evidence before us.

Rohmer’s work will be around to contemplate for a long time—to contemplate with endless curiosity and pleasure—or so one would like to think. There is much that hovers near unavailability (Autumn Tale has never been released on DVD), and one crucial work never available in the U.S., his first film, The Sign of the Lion, which is among many other things a haunting documentary of Paris in the summertime. One could even hope to see the rarest of rarities, his video version of Heinrich von Kleist’s play Käthchen von Heilbronn, as staged by Rohmer (in his own translation) in Nanterre in 1979. Now there is a work to call forth mysteries, with its blend of obsessive love, oneiric prophecy, and imperial politics, and at its center a young girl stubbornly resistant to all forms of reasonable persuasion.

Health Care: Who Knows 'Best'?

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Jerome Groopman

One of the principal aims of the current health care legislation is to improve the quality of care. According to the President and his advisers, this should be done through science. The administration's stimulus package already devoted more than a billion dollars to 'comparative effectiveness research,' meaning, in the President's words, evaluating 'what works and what doesn't' in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

Kibbutz

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:38:00 -0800

Tony Judt

High school-aged kibbutz workers reclining in a banana grove, Deganya, Galilee, 1965 (B. Anthony Stewart/National Geographic/Getty Images)

My Sixties were a little different from those of my contemporaries. Of course, I joined in the enthusiasm for the Beatles, mild drugs, political dissent, and sex (the latter imagined rather than practiced, but in this too I think I reflected majority experience, retrospective mythology notwithstanding). But so far as political activism was concerned, I was diverted from the mainstream in the years between 1963 and 1969 by an all-embracing engagement with left-wing Zionism. I spent the summers of 1963, 1965, and 1967 working on Israeli kibbutzim and much of the time in between was actively engaged in proselytizing Labour Zionism as an unpaid official of one of its youth movements. During the summer of 1964 I was being “prepared” for leadership at a training camp in southwest France; and from February through July of 1966 I worked full time at Machanayim, a collective farm in the Upper Galilee.

This decidedly intense sentimental education worked very well at first. At least through the summer of 1967, when I graduated from voluntary work on a kibbutz to auxiliary participation in the Israeli armed forces, I was the ideal recruit: articulate, committed, and uncompromisingly ideologically conformist. Like the circle dancers in Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I joined with fellow feelers in happy collective revels, excluding dissenters and celebrating our reassuring unity of spirit, purpose, and clothing. I idealized Jewish distinction, and intuitively grasped and reproduced the Zionist emphasis upon separation and ethnic difference. I was even invited—at the absurdly immature age of sixteen—to make a keynote speech to a Zionist youth conference in Paris denouncing smoking as a “bourgeois deviation” and threat to the healthy outdoor commitment of Jewish adolescents. I doubt very much whether I believed this even at the time (I smoked, after all): but I was very good with the words.

The essence of Labour Zionism, still faithful in those years to its founding dogmas, lay in the promise of Jewish work: the idea that young Jews from the diaspora would be rescued from their effete, assimilated lives and transported to remote collective settlements in rural Palestine—there to create (and, as the ideology had it, recreate) a living Jewish peasantry, neither exploited nor exploiting. Derived in equal measure from early-nineteenth-century socialist utopias and later Russian myths of egalitarian village communities, Labour Zionism was characteristically fragmented into conflicting sectarian cults: there were those who believed that everyone on the kibbutz should dress alike, raise their children and eat in common, and use (but not own) identical furniture, household goods, and even books, while deciding collectively upon every aspect of their lives at a mandatory weekly gathering. Softer adaptations of the core doctrine allowed for some variety in lifestyle and even a modicum of personal possessions. And then there were multifarious nuances between kibbutz members, often as not the product of personal or familial conflict recast as fundamentalist discord.

But all were agreed on the broader moral purpose: bringing Jews back to the land and separating them from their rootless diasporic degeneracy. For the neophyte fifteen-year-old Londoner encountering the kibbutz for the first time, the effect was exhilarating. Here was “Muscular Judaism” in its most seductive guise: health, exercise, productivity, collective purpose, self-sufficiency, and proud separatism—not to mention the charms of kibbutz children of one’s own generation, apparently free of all the complexes and inhibitions of their European peers (free, too, of most of their cultural baggage—though this did not trouble me until later).

I adored it. Eight hours of strenuous, intellectually undemanding labor in steamy banana plantations by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, interspersed with songs, hikes, lengthy doctrinal discussions (carefully stage-managed so as to reduce the risk of adolescent rejection while maximizing the appeal of shared objectives), and the ever-present suggestion of guilt-free sex: in those days the kibbutz and its accompanying ideological penumbra still retained a hint of the innocent “free love” ethos of early-twentieth-century radical cults.

In reality, of course, these were provincial and rather conservative communities, their ideological rigidity camouflaging the limited horizon of many of their members. Even in the mid-1960s it was clear that the economy of Israel no longer rested on small-scale domestic agriculture; and the care that left-wing kibbutz movements took to avoid employing Arab labor served less to burnish their egalitarian credentials than to isolate them from the inconvenient facts of Middle Eastern life. I’m sure I did not appreciate all this at the time—though I do recall even then wondering why I never met a single Arab in the course of my lengthy kibbutz stays, despite living in close proximity to the most densely populated Arab communities of the country.

What I did, however, come quite quickly to understand if not openly acknowledge was just how limited the kibbutz and its members really were. The mere fact of collective self-government, or egalitarian distribution of consumer durables, does not make you either more sophisticated or more tolerant of others. Indeed, to the extent that it contributes to an extraordinary smugness of self-regard, it actually reinforces the worst kind of ethnic solipsism.

Even now I can recall my surprise at how little my fellow kibbutzniks knew or cared about the wider world—except insofar as it directly affected them or their country. They were chiefly concerned with the business of the farm, their neighbor’s spouse, and their neighbor’s possessions (in both cases comparing these enviously with their own). Sexual liberation, on the two kibbutzim where I spent extensive time, was largely a function of marital infidelity and the attendant gossip and recrimination—in which respect these model socialist communities rather closely resembled medieval villages, with similar consequences for those exposed to collective disapproval.

As a result of these observations, I came quite early on to experience a form of cognitive dissonance in the face of my Zionist illusions. On the one hand I wanted deeply to believe in the kibbutz as a way of life and as an incarnation of a better sort of Judaism; and being of a dogmatic persuasion, I had little difficulty convincing myself of its principled virtues for some years. On the other hand, I actively disliked it. I could never wait to get away at the end of a work week, hitchhiking or hopping a bus to Haifa (the nearest significant city) where I would while away the Sabbath gorging myself on sour cream and staring wistfully from the dock at the passenger ferries bound for Famagusta, Izmir, Brindisi, and other cosmopolitan destinations. Israel felt like a prison in those days, and the kibbutz like an overcrowded cell.

I was released from my confusions by two quite different developments. When my kibbutz colleagues learned that I had been accepted into Cambridge University and planned to attend, they were appalled. The whole culture of “Aliya”—“going up” (to Israel)—presumed the severing of links and opportunities back in the diaspora. The leaders of the youth movement in those days knew perfectly well that once a teenager in England or France was permitted to stay there through university, he or she was probably lost to Israel forever.

The official position, accordingly, was that university-bound students should forgo their places in Europe; commit themselves to the kibbutz for some years as orange pickers, tractor drivers, or banana sorters; and then, circumstances permitting, present themselves to the community as candidates for higher education—on the understanding that the kibbutz would collectively determine what if any course of studies they should pursue, with the emphasis upon their future usefulness to the collective.

With luck, in short, I might have been sent to college in Israel at the age of twenty-five or so, perhaps to study electrical engineering or, if very fortunate and indulged by my comrades, to train as an elementary teacher of history. At the age of fifteen, this prospect had rather appealed to me. Two years later, having worked hard to get into King’s, I had no intention of declining the opportunity, much less abandoning myself to a life in the fields. The utter incomprehension and palpable disdain of the kibbutz community in the face of my decision served merely to confirm my growing alienation from the theory and practice of communitarian democracy.

The other stimulus to separation, of course, was my experience with the army on the Golan Heights after the Six-Day War. There, to my surprise, I discovered that most Israelis were not transplanted latter-day agrarian socialists but young, prejudiced urban Jews who differed from their European or American counterparts chiefly in their macho, swaggering self-confidence, and access to armed weapons. Their attitude toward the recently defeated Arabs shocked me (testament to the delusions of my kibbutz years) and the insouciance with which they anticipated their future occupation and domination of Arab lands terrified me even then. When I returned to the kibbutz on which I was then living—Hakuk in the Galilee—I felt a stranger. Within a few weeks I had packed my bags and headed home. Two years later, in 1969, I returned with my then girlfriend to see what remained. Visiting kibbutz Machanayim I encountered “Uri,” a fellow orange picker of earlier days. Without bothering to acknowledge me, much less trouble himself with the usual greetings, Uri passed in front of us, pausing only to demand: “Ma ata oseah kan?” (“What are you doing here?”) What indeed?

I don’t regard those years as squandered or misspent. If anything, they furnished me with a store of memories and lessons somewhat richer than those I might have acquired had I simply passed through the decade in conformity with generational proclivities. By the time I went up to Cambridge I had actually experienced—and led—an ideological movement of the kind most of my contemporaries only ever encountered in theory. I knew what it meant to be a “believer”—but I also knew what sort of price one pays for such intensity of identification and unquestioning allegiance. Before even turning twenty I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a south London teenager.

Unlike most of my Cambridge contemporaries, I was thus immune to the enthusiasms and seductions of the New Left, much less its radical spin-offs: Maoism, gauchisme, tiers-mondisme, etc. For the same reasons I was decidedly uninspired by student-centered dogmas of anticapitalist transformation, much less the siren calls of femino-Marxism or sexual politics in general. I was—and remain—suspicious of identity politics in all forms, Jewish above all. Labour Zionism made me, perhaps a trifle prematurely, a universalist social democrat—an unintended consequence which would have horrified my Israeli teachers had they followed my career. But of course they didn’t. I was lost to the cause and thus effectively “dead.”

—“Kibbutz” is part of a continuing series of memoirs by Tony Judt, and appears along with two others in the February 11 issue of the Review.

'Nazis, Soviets, Poles, Jews': An Exchange

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0800

By Richard J. Evans

My President

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:53:00 -0800

Robert Gottlieb

President Franklin D. Roosevelt just after he was elected to a fourth term in office, November 10, 1944 (George Skadding/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

I was jolted the other day when The New York Times science section splashed three big close-up head-shots of FDR across the top of its front page. (The story: his death of a cerebral hemorrhage may have been linked to a melanoma.) Suddenly, unexpectedly, there was the face of my president. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932, at the height of the Depression, more or less a year after I was born, and by the time I became conscious of the great world out there, he had become the family hero: as resourceful as he was wise, as charming as he was brilliant. Everyone we knew loved his handsome, distinguished face, was moved by his beautiful voice—the famous fireside chats!—and, most important of all in those frightening times, took comfort from the confidence he radiated. We knew instinctively that with him leading us, all would be well.

Of course by the time we were in the war I was aware that there were people who hated him—that traitor to his class, that nigger-lover, that camouflaged Jew (Franklin Delano Rosenfeld); him and that virago wife of his, rushing around the world making trouble instead of staying home and looking after the children the way a decent woman would. But such people were beneath contempt. (Decades later, I was seated next to Sandra Day O’Connor at a formal dinner party in Washington, and we found ourselves talking about FDR—and amused at our wildly different experiences of him as kids: Where she grew up, in the ranching world of the southwest, his name was anathema!)

I remember in the fall of 1944 standing on Broadway and 73rd Street, opposite the old newsreel theater, waiting with my mother for the president (our president) to pass by in his motorcade. It was only weeks before the election, and he was campaigning for his fourth term, in freezing weather. It was a long, cold wait. But eventually the cars came flashing by, and there he was—leaning out toward the crowd, waving, smiling. A thrilling sight. You could see even in those few un-retouched seconds, though, that he was worn and tired; just possibly unwell.

Nonetheless, his death only a few months later—at the ridiculously young age of sixty-three—was not only unforeseen but cataclysmic, particularly so, perhaps, for people my age who had never known another president. I was not only in grief, I was scared; the bottom had fallen out of the world. With FDR in the White House you knew that your president was on the job taking care of you—like your parents, or the cop on the corner. The name “Harry Truman” meant nothing to you in 1945—he represented uncertainty, not security.

Have there been presidents since Roosevelt who’ve given American kids that sense of being guided and protected, of being in safe hands? Did Eisenhower? We didn’t need protecting during his reign; everything was stable and secure, or seemed to be—except when we practiced hiding under our desks to shield ourselves from A-bombs. Did Reagan? Perhaps to those who saw him as an amiable grandpa, but he didn’t project Roosevelt’s unshakable benign authority. Did Kennedy? Nixon? Carter? How about George W? And will Barack Obama ever come to stand as a symbolic bulwark between our threatening world and the anxieties of our children? We can only hope he will.

The night of that 1944 election I was so nervous I begged my parents to wake me up in the middle of the night when the voting was conclusive—but only if Roosevelt won. He did, and they did. I went right back to sleep, but I still remember how relieved I was on hearing the good news. With FDR in charge for what I thought would be another four years I had nothing to fear.

Iran's Women of War

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:45:00 -0800

Haleh Esfandiari

Zahra Rahnavard waving to supporters during a campaign rally for her husband, Mir Hussein Moussavi, at Haydarniya Stadium, Tehran, June 9, 2009 (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)

It is entirely appropriate that two women have become the iconic symbols of Iran’s protest movement. Thanks to cell phones and the Internet, millions of people around the world saw footage of the blood-soaked face of the young Neda Agha Soltan, as she lay dying on a Tehran street, shot by security forces during a peaceful demonstration. But even before last June’s rigged presidential election, Zahra Rahnavard, the wife of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, had gained international renown as the first woman in Iranian history to campaign alongside her husband—making speeches of her own and taking a strong stand on controversial social issues.

Ms. Rahnavard has caused a stir, but also set an example. An author and educator in her own right, she was the first female chancellor of any Iranian university—she directed Alzahra University in Tehran from 1998 until 2006—and has served as a political advisor to former president Mohammed Khatami. During the campaign, she was outspoken in calling for reform and also courageously endorsed the demands of the One Million Signatures campaign, a women’s rights movement whose leaders have been attacked and arrested by the Iranian authorities.

Following her example, the wives of the other candidates began to appear on the campaign trail as well. Women were active in the campaigns of the two leading opposition presidential candidates; and when hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets after Ahmadinejad was, improbably, declared the winner, women marched alongside the men, braving assaults and intimidation from the riot police, paramilitary forces, and knife-, club- and chain-wielding goons the government sent after the demonstrators. As an activist friend wryly told me, “They treated us equally. They beat, clubbed and arrested us just like the men.” (In a sign of the growing weight of the women’s vote, President Ahmadenijad—his legitimacy in serious doubt—sought to mollify this constituency by nominating three women to his cabinet, though parliament confirmed only one of them.)

Women have in fact been at the forefront of resistance to an intrusive state ever since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. In the early years of the revolution, they resisted the new regime’s attempt to force them out of the workplace and universities. They found subtle ways—such as showing a bit of hair and wearing shorter robes in pastel colors—of challenging the restrictive dress code the government imposed on them in the name of Islam. They refused to stay segregated, whether in the university classroom or in taxis. Today, more women than men win admission to universities in competitive state-wide examinations, and this trend has so alarmed some members of parliament in recent years that there has been talk of legislation to impose quotas: affirmative action in the interest of men!

In the mid-1990s, women flocked to support the reform-minded administration of President Mohammad Khatami, accounting for, in part, the large majorities by which he won his two terms in office. With the One Million Signatures campaign, launched in 2006 and aimed at collecting a million signatures for a petition protesting discriminatory legislation against women, the women’s movement entered a new phase, implicitly calling for a revision of laws rooted in the basic principles of Islam. Arrest, trial, heavy fines, and imprisonment have not deterred the leaders of this campaign, who come mostly from the broad middle class and have gone to small towns and villages as well as the large cities to collect signatures.

The participation by women in the latest series of protests marks another notable development. Women have shown themselves ready to do what had generally been regarded as ‘men’s work.” Despite the risk of beatings, injury, arrest, even death, they have continued to take a leading part in protests and demonstrations. The demonstrators’ chant, “we are men of war,” has changed to “we are men and women of war.”

When I was held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison in 2007, I was questioned at length about the women’s rights movement; my two interrogators seemed alarmed and befuddled by it. They certainly feared its potential: how else to explain the harsh way in which officials have dealt with the women collecting signatures for a simple petition? But my interrogators also told me they feared a backlash if they used excessive force to disperse female demonstrators.

That was three years ago. Now, the gloves are off. The sight of tens of thousands of women marching alongside men in demonstrations last June seems to have unnerved the authorities. Under the increasingly brutal regime of Ahmadinejad’s second term, Iranians have seen young and middle-aged women clubbed, dragged across pavements, and hustled into vans by police and official thugs in plain clothes. Rahnavard has steadfastly condemned the brutality of the security forces.

Only last week, mothers of young men and women who have disappeared in prisons or other government black holes, and who have been gathering every Saturday in a Tehran park to demand news of their loved ones, were beaten and arrested by security men. They have since been released but some may be asked to appear in court. Such scenes are now seared into the memories of Iranians; they will come back to haunt the regime for years to come.

Revealing the Real Iran

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:53:00 -0800

Claire Messud

When I landed at boarding school in Boston in the fall of 1980—from a public school in Toronto, another world—I assumed the Iranian girls knew the ropes better than I did. Posh New England culture was utterly alien to me; but how much more so must it have been to my fellow boarders lately of Tehran? Aware of the recent revolution—even at fourteen, one couldn’t not be—I nevertheless was unable to relate the girl brushing her teeth beside me in the dorm bathroom to mass demonstrations or the then ongoing hostage crisis half a world away. I never asked the Iranians a single question about their histories: it was tacitly accepted that it was too delicate a subject and, by force of silence, too remote from our placid world of emerald lawns and peeling white columns. What, I now wonder, must the Iranian girls have thought?

As far as I know, they haven’t yet written the novels that might tell us. Others, though, have provided us with powerful reminiscences in the form of memoir: shortly after the turn of the new century, Marjane Satrapi gave us her family’s extraordinary stories of revolutionary times and after, and created, through her iconic graphics, a now-celebrated visual style with which to convey the travails of her native country.

In spite of Satrapi’s triumph and memoirs by other Iranians in exile, not much literary art from within contemporary Iran has yet reached mainstream audiences in the West. The novelist Farnoosh Moshiri’s fictions—including At the Wall of the Almighty and The Bathhouse—have afforded us harrowing accounts of imprisonment and torture under the Islamic regime; but she, older than Satrapi, has also not lived in Iran since the 1980s (she is based in Houston). As we watch Iran’s current political upheavals from afar and try to understand the minds of its citizens today, we might wish for greater literary access: little recent fiction published in Iran is available in translation. The avenues of cultural exchange are not broad.

Early in the last decade, Azar Nafisi’s immensely successful memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) provided a wide American audience with a picture of post-revolutionary Iranian life; but Nafisi’s book is not a novel. Through her account, you glimpse fascinating facets of quotidian life in Tehran over a decade ago, but she doesn’t presume to provide rounded psychological portraits of her students, nor does she alchemically transform her stories in such a way as to create a work of art. As a reader, you learn enthusiastically from, but do not fully inhabit, Nafisi’s world.

Fiction and poetry work differently from history or autobiography, opening to us the interior lives, the unrecorded ephemera and minutiae of people and their places. The Iranian-American writer Dalia Sofer’s first novel The Septembers of Shiraz was published in 2007. Its story is fairly simple: Sofer recounts the incarceration in Evin Prison, not long after the revolution, of a Jewish Iranian paterfamilias, while his wife and young daughter struggle to find information about him and to continue their lives. Meanwhile, the couple’s older child, a son, faces his own challenges in New York City. The book is not elaborate in its telling; but Sofer’s eye for detail and her subtle understanding of character (how much more complicated is such a separation when husband and wife have been progressively more emotionally estranged beforehand?) ensure that the novel is both immediate and deeply affecting.

Painting by Riza Abbasi, c. 1625

Like Satrapi, Sofer left Iran as a child and has lived in exile for most of her life. Her novel, then, describes precisely the Iran from which my classmates had fled; and perhaps this is in part why I find it so moving. Others of the young generation have addressed the situation differently: Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) is the vital and engaging account of a family of Iranian-Americans following the September 11 attacks. Niloufar Talebi has translated and edited a volume of poetry entitled Belonging: New Poetry By Iranians Around the World, a book remarkable in its breadth and diversity, and in the power of its translations. From formalists to experimentalists, from the epic to the lyric, from the political to the erotic, Talebi’s collection offers us a rich sampling of contemporary Iranian poetry from the diaspora.

Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story, published in the United States last year, differs in several ways from these works. For one thing, although Mandanipour has been living in the US since 2006, his literary career has been, until this latest novel, entirely Iranian: this is his first book to appear in English, and while his fiction remained unpublished in Iran for much of the 1990s on account of censorship, he is one of that country’s most celebrated and accomplished contemporary novelists. For another, born in 1957 (and thus a generation older than most of the others), he was an adult when the Islamic Republic was created. He remained in Iran for a quarter century thereafter, and has, consequently, a very different perspective from those who left as children, in the early 1980s.

Mandanipour’s novel is not only directly concerned with contemporary Iran—it’s about a writer trying to write a love story that will satisfy the censors—it is also playfully engaged with Persian literary history, and at the same time, is formally innovative: the influences of Calvino and Kafka are evident in his ironic narrator’s metafictional banter. He both tells us what it is like for his young would-be lovers in Tehran, and, by allusion, by direct conversation with the imagined censor, and by striking out lines and passages of his prose, reveals how much he cannot tell us:

“Sara is studying Iranian literature at Tehran University. ~~However, in compliance with an unwritten law, teaching contemporary Iranian literature is forbidden in Iranian schools and universities…~~
…when Sara reads a contemporary story, she reads the white between the lines, and wherever a sentence is left incomplete and ends with three dots like this “…,” her mind grows very active and begins to imagine what the eliminated words may be…Sara loves these three dots because they allow her to be a writer too…But she never borrows any contemporary literature from her college library or the central library of Tehran University. Even if she wanted to, I don’t think she would find any books by writers such as me.
Ask me why, so that I can explain. [p. 14]

Playfully and yet with utter seriousness, Mandanipour exposes his constraints, and also the devices by which he might hope to convey his matter indirectly: traditional Iranian poetry; cinema. In so doing, Mandanipour expresses the complexity of his culture—not just of the society of the Islamic Republic, but of the underlying Persian traditions that continue to influence it—through the warp and weft of the text itself. This novel doesn’t offer a conventionally realistic narrative, but to read it—and to appreciate that simply on account of its publication, Mandanipour is henceforth unable to return to Iran—is to understand, by inhabiting rather than by being told, what life there now, and the making of art, might actually be like.

Podcast: Charles Wright Reads Selected Sestets and Other Poems

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:19:04 -0800

Charles Wright reads from his recent collection, Sestets, and talks to Sasha Weiss about the importance of landscape in his work, his writing process, and how he came to experiment with the six-line form. To read Wright's poems published in the Review, please visit nybooks.com

Podcast: Andrew O'Hagan on Samuel Johnson

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:37:57 -0800

Andrew O'Hagan talks to Sasha Weiss about Samuel Johnson's various and contradictory character, how his Rambler essays shaped our notion of literary talent and professional authorship, and why, in his tercentenary year, Johnson remains essential reading. To read O'Hagan's article, or his other work for the Review, please visit nybooks.com

Podcast: Joost Hiltermann on Iraq on the Edge

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:34:58 -0800

Joost Hiltermann speaks with Nathan Thrall about the political crisis facing Iraq as it prepares for parliamentary elections in 2010 and the departure of American troops the following year. To read Hiltermann's article, "Iraq on the Edge," please visit nybooks.com, or read his latest blog post on Iraqi politics at blogs.nybooks.com

Podcast: Chris Jordan on Midway Atoll and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:42:15 -0800

Photographer and activist Chris Jordan speaks with Eve Bowen about his recent photographs, taken at one of the world's most remote marine wildlife sanctuaries, of albatross chicks killed by plastic waste that their parents have mistaken for food. To read more and see Jordan's images of the chicks, please visit http://blogs.nybooks.com