Reviews and News:
Sir Kenelm Digby’s father, Everard, was hanged, drawn and quartered for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. Kenelm was less interested in politics than he was in the sciences and the arts. In 1644, he published his magnum opus, Two Treatises, which “addressed the question of the natural proof of the immortality of the soul.”
* *
Heather Mac Donald raves about the Met’s production of Roberto Devereux: “If Peter Gelb does nothing else of note during the remainder of his tenure as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, he will have contributed to world culture with this season’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s hauntingly beautiful tragedy Roberto Devereux, never before heard at the Met.”
* *
What was life like at English country estates between the wars? Busy: “Country-house parties could last from 48 hours to three weeks. The word ‘week-end’ entered common usage as expanding rail networks and car ownership meant that people could dash to the country on Friday and return on Monday exhausted after a race, a ball, a shoot or a political gathering. (Although, as Mr Tinniswood points out, the phrase in polite circles was still ‘Saturday-to-Monday’, to distinguish the leisured class from those who had to be at work on Monday morning.) Women, in particular, were confronted with gruelling social expectations: a seven-day shooting party, for example, would require multiple outfits for every day of the week, and spending whole seasons like this was arduous.”
* *
“A debut novel named after a classic song and featuring an unconventional household has taken France by storm. Since its publication in January, En Attendant Bojangles (Waiting for Bojangles) has sold more than 160,000 copies and won three popular French literary prizes. Plans call for publication in 35 countries around the world, including the U.S. by Simon & Schuster.” The author, Olivier Bourdeaut, describes it as “resolutely optimistic.”
* *
Vendela Vida reviews Herta Müller’s recently translated The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, “a collage of images, stories and fragments of forbidden songs” that captures “how terrifying and rife with betrayal life in Romania was during the end of Ceausescu’s regime.”
* *
Bruce Cole on The Guggenheim’s golden throne: “Cattelan is just the latest fashionable artist to be attracted by human waste.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
At Public Discourse, Nathan Schlueter argues that the lesson of Thomas More’s Utopia is that anger at injustice must be moderated by prudence:
“Readers of Utopia ordinarily take its satire to be directed at the imperfect political institutions of sixteenth-century England. In many important respects, it is. But what they often miss is the equally earnest satirical indictment of the person who delivers that harangue, Raphael Hythloday, whose name can be translated as ‘Healing Nonsense.’
“The literary context for Hythloday’s description of Utopia, which takes up almost the entire portion of Book II, is Hythloday’s denial that any good can be done by advising kings. This question is the same as the question whether any good can be gained from engaging in politics. When More and Peter Giles demur, Hythloday replies with a series of examples purporting to show how much human envy, greed, vanity, and other vices prevent political improvement. Notably, in each case Hythloday contrasts the actual practices he is condemning with idealized examples from fictional regimes he has supposedly encountered on his journeys.
“While Hythloday believes that this contrast between the real and the imagined ideal justifies his political pessimism, More sees in it the source of the problem.”
* *
Image of the Day: Giethoorn
* *
Poem: Maryann Corbett, “Experimental Design”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
