Reviews and News:
Is there a place for Muslims in France? According to Pierre Manet there is, but “France must offer its Muslim community political concessions while simultaneously making political demands. Concessions would include halal menus in schools, the right to wear the hijab, unisex hours at swimming pools; demands would include a ban on practices incompatible with the French way of life, such as the burqa, polygamy, and the intimidation of ‘blasphemers.’ Manent’s most fraught proposal, however, is to restrict the foreign funding of Muslim religious institutions: He argues plausibly that Muslim institutions financed by foreign countries whose way of life is anathema to France should not participate in French political life.”
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Plutarch’s politics: “While Socrates says the city and its regime are windows into the citizen’s soul, Plutarch, ‘treats the citizen’s soul as a window onto the city’.”
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Does America have too much capitalism or too little? “Free-market capitalism is out of favor. In the New York Times Magazine, economist Joseph Stiglitz, who helped create the World Trade Organization as an advisor to President Bill Clinton, pronounced the ‘experiment’ of the “market economy” over the past 30 years a failure, and many Democrats agree. But it’s not just the Democrats who’ve shifted from a pro-market stance. Republican voters supporting Donald Trump share similar misgivings. And the sentiment is global. At the September G20 meeting, Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, a former Goldman Sachs banker, exhorted fellow leaders to ‘civilize capitalism.’ Before America and the rest of the West declare free-market capitalism the culprit for our recent economic woes, however, we should ask ourselves: How much capitalism does the West really have, and is it really behind the West’s problems?”
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A. N. Wilson reviews Douglas Smith’s Rasputin: “The author of a biography needs to ask how long a reasonable reader might wish to spend in the subject’s company. Rasputin was a grotesque phenomenon. He was, however, a skein of repellent simplicities which, stretching over nearly 700 pages, becomes simply tedious. To read a book of this length at a sensible pace would take you a week. Who wants to spend a week with Rasputin, with his ponderous mumbo-jumbo, his easy seduction of nursery maids and religiously inclined Grand Duchesses? It does not seem, even from this exhaustive study, as if he ever said anything remotely interesting.”
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Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories: “Odessa in pre-Soviet days may have been a region of mythic heroes, who share something of the amoral vigor of the bandits and warriors of folklore, but it also hosted a plundered populace. A city run by bandits is a paradise for no one but the strong. Still, compared to the regime that pacified the city, old Odessa may not have been so bad after all. The Soviet government rooted out corruption and crime, but it also cracked down on religion and innocent customs, reorganizing here as everywhere according to the blunt dictates of unnuanced rationality.”
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The first of the female war correspondents: “The wistful nephew of a former secret agent in the Second World War once told me of his utter frustration: his aunt, well into her nineties, refused to talk of her adventures. Patrick Garrett had already read his great-aunt Clare Hollingworth’s autobiography, but it was short on personal detail. He’d also spent many hours talking to her in her apartment in Hong Kong, though she added little to personalise the details of her career in journalism that were already in the public domain. Then, in his parents’ attic back in England, he discovered a ‘battered trunk, plastered with shipping labels’. In it were letters, campaign medals, documents, torn photographs of former lovers… His great-aunt’s past sprang to life.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times, Paula Deitz tells the story of the restoration of Giorgio Vasari’s Last Supper (1546) following the 1966 Florence flood. It took over 40 years to complete:
“In early morning light, the low buildings lining both sides of the Arno River here glow in their myriad shades of ochre, like the shallow river itself, which flows calmly through the city.
“When I was here on Nov. 4, 1966, with my husband-to-be on our first trip to Europe together, it was quite a different sight. It had rained for days, and, totally saturated, the water table rose up; the river, coursing angrily with a release from an upriver dam, overflowed its retaining walls into the streets. Stranded in our hotel along the river, I looked down from a second-floor interior balcony and saw that the water had risen frighteningly to the ceiling of the lobby. I asked for two candles, two bottles of water and a couple of packets of breadsticks.
“Would the foundation of the old building collapse? I took two flat wooden drawers from the armoire and placed them by the window in case we needed flotation devices. Then we took turns sleeping until dawn broke. Outside, large metal drums of heating oil, already topped off for winter, were swept into the Arno and banged all night against the bridges. Otherwise, all was ghostly quiet. By the next morning, the headline in La Notte described the scene: ‘Florence — City of Ghosts.’
“The city was a sea of sludge. With no food or water, and the risk of typhoid, we were told by the hotel staff to leave immediately to unburden Florence. One enterprising guest with a car on a hill ferried us in shifts to the train for Bologna.
“We knew we were leaving behind hundreds of ruined treasures — more than 1,500 artworks damaged by the muddy water and oil mix, by one count, as well as entire library collections. Of the eight major floods that have afflicted Florence since 1333 — three of them on a Nov. 4 — this one in 1966 was considered the worst.
“I have returned here, now the editor of an arts journal, to remember and to observe the preparations for the 50th anniversary of this catastrophic flood. The city abounds with commemorative exhibitions, but the main event on the day itself is the reinstallation in the Cenacolo, the old refectory of Santa Croce, of Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Last Supper‘ (1546). Long in the news, the five-panel painting is the final, most complex, severely damaged masterpiece in the flood to be restored.
“On that Friday, the water rose to 20 feet around Santa Croce, and ‘Last Supper’ was totally immersed for more than 12 hours, its lower segments for even longer. The ceremony itself represents the symbolic end of an era, a poignant half-century in modern art history during which scores of experts in Florence, and young apprentices just learning their trade, labored painstakingly to restore priceless works. But the challenges for the Vasari appeared insurmountable until the last decade, with conservators hoping for new expertise to help them.”
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Image of the Day: First snowfall
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Poem: Ricardo Pau-Llosa, “Reef”
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