For anyone familiar with Tove Jansson from the Moomins alone, the most surprising works in the exhibition—which aims to rectify the fact that less attention has generally been paid to her range as a visual artist—will be her early self-portraits and her wartime political cartoons. The exhibition’s progression has two somewhat contradictory results. On the one hand, by opening with unfamiliar parts of Jansson’s oeuvre it emphasizes her breadth. On the other, it gets that out of the way before moving on to better-known material. Its momentum ends up flowing toward the Moomins rather than away from them.
Books
The Afterlife of a Memoir
The writer of a memoir must necessarily reveal a great deal about herself or himself, and often about other people, too. You sacrifice your own privacy, and you sacrifice the privacy of others to whom you may have given no choice. To be the author of a memoir is also to become a confessional for other people. All over the world, people tell me their stories. Sometimes, sharing their stories with me is all they want, and it is enough. Sometimes, they want a wider recognition for their stories. To them, I say this: write, but only if you are sure you want to live with the consequences every day for the rest of your life.
The B&N Podcast: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
There may be no writer closer to the center of our national conversation about race, equality, justice, and how racism divides and disorders our society than Ta-Nehisi Coates. His 2015 book Between the World and Me, an anatomy of the corrosive power of racism in America in the form of a letter to his teenage son, brought him global acclaim, a National Book Award for Nonfiction, and a Macarthur fellowship. In this episode of the podcast, Coates talks with Bill Tipper about his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Knitting together some of the most vital essays the author has published over the past decade — including a profile of President Barack Obama, a searing indictment of destruction of the black family via the justice system, and Coates’s landmark “The Case for Reparations,” We Were Eight Years in Power takes readers along with Coates into a deep consideration of nothing less urgent than the fate of the nation.
“We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”
But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.
We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.
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The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir
“Ours was a word-oriented family,” Anne Fadiman declares on the second page of her winning new memoir — an understatement if ever there was one. Fadiman, who has written delightful bibliophilic essays (collected in Ex Libris and At Large and At Small) about building castles at age four with her father’s pocket-size set of Trollope and being fed a rich diet of polysyllabic words — courtesy of his bedtime stories about a bookworm who satisfies an appetite for sesquipedalian nutrition by chomping through dictionaries — has at long last expanded on these charming glimpses of her bookish upbringing.
The Wine Lover’s Daughter introduces Fadiman’s father and kindred spirit, wordsmith and wit Clifton Fadiman (1904–99), to a new generation with a deliciously rich, well-balanced portrait. The book is centered as much on his passion for fine wine — and her own inability to develop a taste for it — as on his extraordinary “multihypenate” career as a longtime New Yorker book critic, emcee of the wildly popular NBC radio quiz show Information Please, Book-of-the-Month Club judge, and author of Wally the Wordworm and numerous literary anthologies, all sadly out of print.
Fadiman’s first line sets the tone: “My father was a lousy driver and a two-finger typist, but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover.” That “swain” is pure Fadiman. So, too, are her astute comments about “Brief History of a Love Affair,” her father’s introduction to The Joys of Wine, the massive tome he co-authored with Sam Aaron, his friend and wine merchant (whom he jokingly called “the vintner of my discontent”): “The amorous vocabulary wasn’t a metaphor,” she writes. “Aside from books, he loved nothing — and no one — longer, more ardently, or more faithfully than he loved wine.”
But Fadiman’s memoir uncorks much more than a remembrance of drinks past or a daughter’s filial intoxication. By allowing her memories to ripen over the many years since her father’s death in 1999, the result is a superbly evolved, less tannic pour. Organized into what she does best — twenty-three short essays, just shy of two cases — Fadiman tackles some difficult aspects of her legacy. The bitterness she might have felt about, say, her father’s request after he’d gone blind at eighty-eight for her to call two women — who she quickly realized were his lovers — and tell them what had happened has been mellowed by time. The same goes for his “reflexively condescending” sexism. She somewhat evasively calls her parents’ marriage “imperfect but interesting.” One hopes she’ll profile her mother, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, who died in 2002, more thoroughly in another book. Like her daughter, Annalee preferred milkshakes to wine, but unlike her daughter, she gave up her writing career — which included early success as a Hollywood screenwriter and as a rare female reporter in China during WWII — after having children.
Fadiman delves more deeply into her father’s insecurities than into his relationships with women. She deftly traces the anti-Semitism he faced from both within and without, which fueled his social-climbing ambition and workaholism but also contributed to his sense of being an outsider. Born in Brooklyn in 1904 to parents from Minsk and Belarus, he strove early on to distance himself from his lower-middle-class Jewish origins after realizing “that things were run by people who spoke well and who were not Jewish, not poor, and not ugly.” By the time he reached Columbia University, he had developed a vast knowledge of literature, a sharp wit, a plummy “hypercultivated voice,” and an envy and passion for “all things fabricated with skill and effort” — including art, books, foods, and, eventually, wine. Yet, despite his brilliance, he was denied a teaching position, told by Columbia’s English Department head, “We have room for only one Jew, and we have chosen Mr. Trilling.” Fadiman writes that her father never got over it.
The Wine Lover’s Daughter also addresses what Fadiman calls the oakling dilemma — growing up in the shadow of a famous parent who “grabs the sunlight.” Her father, forty-nine when she was born, fortunately lived long enough to appreciate her early books, including her NBCC prizewinner, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down — though not long enough to see her join the faculty of an Ivy League college, his dream. (Fadiman has taught nonfiction writing at Yale since 2005.)
Underpinning Fadiman’s reckoning with her father’s legacy also involves gauging their shared sources of pleasure — including doggerel, word games, and cheese — as well as their differences, most pointedly her love of the outdoors and his love of wine. Despite many humorously recounted attempts, she just can’t — well, swallow it. So, as she’s done before in far-reaching essays about a few of her favorite things — ice cream, coffee, mail — she doggedly investigates further. She goes so far as to consult with scientists at Cornell and Yale who subject her recalcitrant taste buds to various tests. The hilarious quest encapsulates her strengths as a reporter and essayist: persistence, humor, clarity, and intelligence. The upshot: she discovers that her heavily papillated tongue is highly sensitive to sourness and bitterness, which is why mere alcohol doesn’t thrill her at all and radishes hit her “more like a bee-sting than a food.” Vindicated yet disappointed, she comments: “So there it was. I didn’t taste what my father tasted.”
Even Fadiman’s notes on her sources are fascinating. “This book contains no reconstructed or imagined quotations,” she states proudly. She has relied on letters, essays, transcribed interview tapes — plus notes she was taking all along, right down to her father’s last utterances. She says she changed her original title, The Oenophile’s Daughter, when she “discovered that hardly anyone knew how to spell, pronounce, or define ‘oenophile’ ” — and was consoled when she realized that similar problems killed Speak, Mnemosyne, Nabokov’s original title for Speak, Memory. Such are the trials of a highbrow, sesquipedalian vocabulary. But, like her father, Fadiman has that rare ability to wear her erudition lightly. And what he said about wine also applies to The Wine Lover’s Daughter: it is a delectable ode to cultivation and civilization.
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Year One: When Black Women Lead
It was in 1991—the year legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term “intersectionality”—that Anita Hill came forward with sexual harassment allegations against a conservative nominee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. If Hill had been believed, it could have sunk his appointment. But such claims from a black woman were not taken seriously. Believing Hill decades ago could have changed access to the ballot and who occupies the White House. Americans should have listened to a black woman then. They should listen to black women now.
Poems from the Abyss
Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet, writer, diplomat, exile, and Nobel laureate, was a figure whose own life seemed to embody the turmoil of the twentieth century. He lived through both world wars and the Russian Revolution, experienced fascism, communism, and democracy, lived in Eastern and Western Europe and, later, the United States, and he returned again and again to these events in his writing. “To me Miłosz is one of those authors whose personal life dictates his work…. Except for his poems, all of his writing is tied to his…personal history or to the history of his times,” Witold Gombrowicz, the other great Polish writer in exile, said of him. I agree, but would not exclude Miłosz’s poems and don’t believe he would either, since he regarded his highest achievement as a poet to be his ability to fuse history and his personal experience.
The Bells of Balangiga
To commemorate the forty-eight men they lost in the battle of 1901—or perhaps to avenge them—American troops brought the three bells of Balangiga home from the Philippines with them. When President Donald Trump travels to Asia this November, he will meet with the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who recently called for the return of the bells. At the heart of the dispute is the question of how we ought to remember a little-known, inglorious war in which American and Filipino troops alike committed acts of valor and war crimes.
Hugh Edwards: Curator, Mentor, Friend
By the spring of 1962, when I met him, Hugh Edwards had been responsible for more than twenty exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, including a selection by Edward Weston and a survey of Alexander Gardner’s Civil War pictures. On a visit to the museum after we had met, he said to me, “Go downstairs and see that show.” It was Robert Frank’s first solo exhibit.
Year One: The Mad King
“We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals,” said Senator Jeff Flake (Republican of Arizona). But the reality is that the GOP has, in fact, accepted the Trump New Normal. Even though other Republicans shared Flake’s views, few were willing to speak out, and the GOP’s surrender seems complete. Less than a year into his presidency, we hear the same question again and again: What will it take for Republicans to break with their Mad King?
Persia’s Hybrid Art
“Technologies of the Image,” now at the Harvard Museum of Art, is fascinated by precisely the thing that repelled many Europeans about art of the Qajar period (1779-1925)—its hybrid aesthetic, a combination of “native styles” with European sources and technology. The curators are especially interested in what they call “remediation,” that is, images made in one medium subsequently emulated in another: a painting that incorporates a photographic model, for example, or a lithograph based on a sculpture. The longer one studies them, the more absorbing they become.
Sig Nordal 