Reviews and News:
Dispatches from the past: “Years ago, when he was thinking about writing an autobiography, John le Carré recounts, he hired two detectives to research him and his family. As the son of a flamboyant con man, as a spy for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and as a novelist who spent his days making up things, truth and memory tended to blur together: ‘I’m a liar, I explained. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.’ He was interested in learning the facts of his life, he told the detectives — since, ‘as a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists.'” The Pigeon Tunnel is not an autobiography — and certainly doesn’t add many factual details to Mr. Sisman’s thoughtful portrait. Rather, it’s a collection of reminiscences (some, familiar from published essays) that provide glimpses of the author over the years, hopping and skipping through time, and recounted with the storytelling élan of a master raconteur — by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy. The book provides insights into the quicksilver transactions between art and life performed by Mr. le Carré in his fiction: how his ‘wise Oxford mentor’ Vivian Green provided him, by example, with ‘the inner life of George Smiley’; and how his own tortured relationship with his disreputable father, Ronnie (‘con man, fantasist, occasional jailbird’), fueled the filial drama in his most psychologically complex novel, A Perfect Spy.”
* *
Carlos Lozada reviews Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book on Southern tea partiers: “When she lands in Louisiana, Hochschild realizes, ‘I was definitely not in Berkeley, California. . . . No New York Times at the newsstand, almost no organic produce in grocery stores or farmers’ markets, no foreign films in movie houses, few small cars, fewer petite sizes in clothing stores, fewer pedestrians speaking foreign languages into cell phones — indeed, fewer pedestrians. There were fewer yellow Labradors and more pit bulls and bulldogs. Forget bicycle lanes, color-coded recycling bins, or solar panels on roofs. In some cafes, virtually everything on the menu was fried.’ Dear God, no yellow Labs or solar panels? How do you live?”
* *
Gideon Rachman’s Easternisation “is an essential survey of the migration of economic and political power away from the USA and Europe, towards Russia, China and also possibly India in the long term. Will this lead to further examples of the ‘Thucydides trap’, which almost always results in warlike clashes when rising powers confront established ones?”
* *
“Ancient Egyptian texts written on rock faces and papyri are being brought together for the general reader for the first time after a Cambridge academic translated the hieroglyphic writings into modern English.”
* *
The tension of Watteau’s military works: “What is most novel and striking about these works…is their depiction of individual soldiers going about their business. And in this respect, the paintings are greatly supported by an abundance of drawings at the Frick. When we compare the paintings with the drawings on which they were based, we find almost a split in artistic consciousness. Although reality tends to be fastidiously mediated in Old Master paintings, the preliminary drawings that underpin them often reveal an astounding clarity of observation.”
* *
The other Victorian landscape artist: “When you come upon an eight-hundred-page book the size of an unabridged dictionary weighing eight and one-half pounds—meaning that it cannot be read in bed or in an easy chair—you are not inclined to pick it up. But Linda Parshall’s masterful English translation of the intriguingly titled Briefe eines Verstorbenen (Letters of a Dead Man)—an unsuccessful ploy to preserve the author’s anonymity—is a page-turner. Although it must be propped on a reading stand or placed on a table, you will find yourself immersed in an engaging and informative travelogue that paints a perceptive portrait of Regency England during the years 1826–1829, a period of unprecedented British prosperity. The not-so-mysterious and then very much alive author, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871), was a minor nobleman who is remembered in Germany primarily for a popular dessert known as a Pückler Eis, a confection layering chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream. But Pückler is far more than a gastronomically memorialized aristocrat, or even an observant sightseer and chronicler of British behavior and mores; along with Frederick Law Olmsted he ranks as one of the two most significant figures in nineteenth-century landscape-design history.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times Magazine, John Herrman explains how small meme publishers are making Facebook more political:
“Maybe you’ve noticed your feed becoming bluer; maybe you’ve felt it becoming redder. Either way, in the last year, it has almost certainly become more intense. You’ve seen a lot of media sources you don’t recognize and a lot of posts bearing no memorable brand at all. You’ve seen politicians and celebrities and corporations weigh in directly; you’ve probably seen posts from the candidates themselves. You’ve seen people you’re close to and people you’re not, with increasing levels of urgency, declare it is now time to speak up, to take a stand, to set aside allegiances or hangups or political correctness or hate.
“Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.
“The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.”
* *
Image of the Day: Theatre bookstore
* *
Poem: David Mason, “Given Rain”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
