T he kids are not alright: I reported yesterday that Ian Buruma is out at the New York Review of Books. It was not immediately clear if he had been fired or had resigned. Turns out, he resigned. Everyone supported the publication of the Ghomeshi essay—even the publisher—but after it provoked a flurry of denunciations on Twitter, university presses threatened to stop advertising in NYRB’s pages, and he felt “forced to resign”: “They are afraid of the reactions on the campuses ... it is a capitulation to social media and university presses.”
The history of Salvator Mundi keeps getting stranger. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that it was purchased in 1958 by a Baton Rouge couple for $120. “The long-lost Leonardo painting has a patchwork provenance that places it in the hands of English kings, Russian oligarchs and, most recently, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Yet gaps and overlaps in its ownership history have been the subject of scrutiny among scholars and connoisseurs, as reported on the front page of The Art Newspaper’s September issue. Rumours never cease to swirl around the work, especially after its display at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, scheduled for 18 September, was inexplicably delayed.”
Britain’s secret war on Napoleon: “Laws and sausages, we know, are better not seen in the making; and neither are ‘black ops’. Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, and Trafalgar on the dunes near Burnham Thorpe, but Britain’s secret war against Napoleon was won in less wholesome places. ‘This is a book about propaganda, spying and covert operations… a very modern story of secret committees, slush funds, assassination,’ writes Tim Clayton, whose Waterloo: Four Days that Changed Europe’s Destiny was by far the most scholarly of the many volumes produced for the bicentenary. And what an astonishing story it all is, alternately inspiring and disturbing, a challenging addition to the Napoleonic canon.”
Here is the 2018 Man Booker shortlist.
Elizabeth Bishop’s solitude: “But being lonely and being alone are not the same, and Bishop recognized from a young age that there was something special, even salvific, about the latter. ‘There is a peculiar quality about being alone, an atmosphere that no sounds or persons can ever give,’ she wrote in the 1929 essay. ‘It is as if being with people were the Earth of the mind, the land with its hills and valleys, scent and music: but in being alone, the mind finds its Sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds.’”
What happened to Dinesh D’Souza? How did a serious conservative writer come to produce films like The Death of a Nation? Read Alice B. Lloyd to find out: “He could still be writing serious books, he insists, and enjoying the friendship and favor of the conservative elite. ‘I miss that, I miss that,’ he says when I ask whether his mind ever wanders back to the days of D.C. dinner party debates and chess matches against conservative luminaries. He’s lost in thought for a moment, but recovers. ‘I moved to California in the year 2000, and by doing that I took myself out of the D.C. camp, which I was very much a part of.’ Living in San Diego, a long way from his new base at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he found himself adrift. ‘I lost that social circle. That was my social circle.’ But the way D’Souza sees it, he had to leave behind the world of Washington at some point. There’s no use talking to the whole country,’ he’d realized...‘The futility of trying to do that hit me—the waste of time.’”
Essay of the Day:
I’ve read a lot of pieces on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Christopher Beha’s in the latest issue of Harper’s is the best so far. The six-volume novel is not just a record of disenchantment. It’s a critique of it and a testament of our inability to give up on meaning:
“With notable frequency the novel has taken disenchantment itself as its subject, and it has asked the uncomfortable question of whether the kind of heroic greatness that was literature’s primary concern from the Iliad up to Orlando Furioso is even possible under the current dispensation. That this tension animates Don Quixote is obvious enough. But it is also present, for example, in nearly all of Dostoevsky’s work, perhaps most poignantly in The Idiot, in which a ‘positively good and beautiful man’ proves to be tragically unfit for the modern world. George Eliot announces the theme in Middlemarch when she calls Dorothea Brooks a “Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing.” Joyce works a comic variation on it when he turns the events of one Dublin day into Homeric epic. Proust—so often cited as Knausgaard’s primary model—builds his own monumental novel around the recurrence of higher moments and his narrator’s effort to reconcile them with the inevitable loss of linear time. This is the tradition that justifies Lukács’s definition of the novel as ‘the epic of a world abandoned by God,’ and with the publication of the 1,200-page conclusion to My Struggle, it is now unmistakable that Knausgaard has been working within this tradition all along.
“If it has been sometimes difficult to recognize as much, this may be because the sheer volume of detail in Knausgaard’s book leads readers to assume a certain relationship between the author and reality. We associate this brand of minute noticing with the Nabokovian school, in which sustained attention is an act of love inevitably reciprocated when the world on which attention is bestowed offers up its numinous secrets. In My Struggle, something like the opposite takes place. Karl Ove keeps hoping that if he looks at his own life long enough it will reveal itself as meaningful, but it rarely ever does.”
* * *
“We could give up on the idea that anything we do has a larger significance outside ourselves, or that the events of our lives might be shaped into something significant. That is, if life is incapable of providing meaning, we might choose life by choosing meaninglessness. It’s possible to read My Struggle, with all its anti-literary gestures, as representing just such a choice. While composing it, Knausgaard committed himself to a kind of automatic writing. At certain points, he says, he was producing twenty pages a day, a number that will strike anyone who has attempted to write a novel as obscene. He was trying, he says, to get beyond any rational artistic impulse. The result is a book in which contradictions abound, a book with moments of great insight and moments of great banality, a book where one thing often seems to follow another for no reason at all, a book that aggressively courts insignificance.
“But unlike contemporary life, a book can’t help having a reason for being. The world may or may not be a created place, but the world of a novel unquestionably is. This fact has many implications. When a writer proceeds by chance or depicts the absurd, he cannot help saying something about the role of chance in our lives or the absurdity of man’s condition. Even when a book fails to cohere for no good reason, that will say something about the relationship of literature to the world or, at the very least, about the ineptness of the author. A novel simply does not have the luxury of meaninglessness. Truly giving up on meaning would require giving up on writing itself.”
Photo: Cobh
Poem: Frederick Turner, “On Gibbs’ Law”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.