The image of an interior shattered by outside forces could be the emblem for all Cristian Mungiu’s films. He loves to present stories in which someone’s integrity is assailed by external influences, and Graduation offers one of his most melancholy contraptions for testing his characters’ limitations.
Books
Britain: When Vengeance Spreads
For all the gestures of inter-communal solidarity that have been given much publicity since the June 18 attack outside a London mosque, the more significant and ominous sentiment has been one of vindication. Anecdotal evidence, the prevalence of online Islamophobia, and a spike in cases of anti-Muslim taunting in the street suggest that many Britons, from small towns in southern England to depressed, working-class areas in the north, feel that “they” had it coming.
A Presumption of Guilt
Late one night several years ago, I got out of my car on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I’d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood that I didn’t consider a high-crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless submission. I begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and over again, “It’s all right, it’s okay.” The man was a uniformed police officer. As a criminal defense attorney, I knew that my survival required careful, strategic thinking. I had to stay calm.
Fathers & Daughters
When he started releasing hour-long comedy specials ten years ago, Louis C.K.’s material was long on kids, marriage, men and women, and getting older and fatter. These subjects are still a big part of his acts, especially in Louie, but he’s gotten even more traction with observations about our national mood disorder: the irritable, selfish public behavior and private melancholy of Americans in the smartphone age (or sometimes, more specifically, affluent white Americans). He’s most effective when he uses himself as representative American jerk and melancholic.
Wolf on a String
Benjamin Black, the name under which Irish writer John Banville runs his criminal operations, is best known for his Dublin pathologist, Quirke, and the murders and general wickedness that have come the way of that angst-ridden gloomy guts. In Wolf on a String Black abandons Ireland’s dismal postwar years and steps back to the turn seventeenth century, in Prague — thereby revisiting the scene of his progenitor in Banville’s early novel Kepler.
Christian Stern, a young natural philosopher lately of the University of Würzburg, has just arrived at the imperial city, hoping to make his way into the court of Emperor Rudolf II, a man obsessed with the occult. Within hours, however, he is full of schnapps and wandering the streets in the night, whereupon he comes across the body of a murdered woman with her throat ripped out. The next thing he knows he has been charged with the crime, thrown into a dungeon, and questioned: first by the emperor’s high steward, a sinister individual called Felix Wenzel, and then by the steward’s devious, lethally charming rival, the court’s chamberlain, Philipp Lang. (“I had the impression of being circled about and sniffed at by a sleek and gleaming creature — a panther, say, or some such sinuous, burnished beast.”) Christian’s grasp of the occult arts — magic, alchemy, astrology, hermeticism, and the like — combined with one of Rudolf’s recent dreams, wins him not just escape from suspicion but the emperor’s favor and a place in his court. “And so, amid such drama, tumult and outlandish pantomime, began my sojourn in the Capital of Magic.”
Christian’s first assignment is to discover the murderer of the young woman, who, it turns out, was Magdalena Kroll, one of the emperor’s mistresses. Still, when Benjamin Black serves up a dead body, whodunit procedurals take a backseat to evocation of zeitgeist and glimpses how things work behind the scenes. That is the case here, in spades. Living amid the trappings of grandeur, caught in love’s coils (as it happens), and given to “wine-tainted tattle and braggadocio,” Christian neglects the task of discovering Magdalena’s killer, and for a couple of hundred pages the plot has little momentum.
Be that as it may, the reader is kept fully engaged by the felicity of Black’s writing, its intoxicating brio, and, not least, its hint of the eldritch — so fitting in a world infatuated with the occult and illusion. At one point, hearing a dreadful scuffling outside his door, Christian peers out and sees “a low, bent shape hopping and scampering along . . . I could not be sure it was even a human shape. I had the impression, I could not say why, of a large and general gleefulness, as if the night itself had joined with the fleeing creature to make savage fun of me.”
And, indeed, the novel is populated by a cast of exotics and grotesques, some based in history, some entirely fictional: In addition to Wenzel and Lang, there is Serafina, a beautiful religious novice whose tongue has been cut out; the diabolical dwarf, Jeppe Schenckel, who also appeared in Kepler; Girolamo Malaspina, papal nuncio, gourmandizer, and inveterate schemer; Edward Kelley, alchemic fraudster and onetime associate of “the English magus,” John Dee; Caterina Sardo, an aging beauty absent conscience or restraint, who is the emperor’s main mistress and mother of his children; Don Giulio, her weird, exquisitely unsavory son; and Rudolf himself: “His Imperial and increasingly dotty Majesty.” Christian is seduced by and smitten with Caterina, and it fills him with jealous horror to reflect on the conjunction of Rudolf, Caterina, and the unlovely Giulio — by the thought, as Benjamin Black puts it so nicely, “of Rudolf, that fat frog, lowering the great bloodless soft sack of himself down upon my slender Venus and inflicting upon her tender innards the makings of this sickly-looking mooncalf.”
Christian observes early on that he has “always considered the appearance of things to be no more than a gauzy veil behind which a truer reality is covertly and marvelously at work.” Those, of course, are the thoughts of a young Neoplatonist, but, as it happens, they are also those of a young dupe. Eventually Christian begins to have a “deepening sense . . . of being at the center on an intricately devised, immensely subtle and cruelly malicious game.”
And, yes! International intrigue raises its crafty head: The British diplomat and spy Henry Wotton appears on the scene. A perfidious and highly credible conspiracy emerges, as do shocking revelations, one of which is so creepily described that I shall quote it, as no one who has not read the book will understand what it means: “A mandrake root, bristling with tendrils and all caked with marl, its fork entwined about her white and gleaming limbs.” That is so beautifully horrid that I really do hope Benjamin Black will make this period and its fantastical milieu his own for at least a couple more novels.
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The Language of Diane Arbus
To the Editors: In an otherwise characteristically sensitive piece on Diane Arbus, Hilton Als repeats without qualification and as a truism that Diane Arbus “used the word ‘freaks’ to describe [her] subjects….” While often repeated, and in this case possibly unintentional in the implicit breadth of its meaning, nothing could be further from the truth, and the promulgation of the idea harms the reputations of both the photographer and the writer.
More Bresson Than Mozart
To the Editors: Michael Wood, alluding to Robert Bresson’s practice of letting quotations speak for him, writes, “When Mozart says of certain works of his that ‘they are brilliant…, but they lack poverty,’ he is close to the heart of Bresson’s aesthetics.” Mozart, unfortunately, never quite said this.
Soldiers to Students: The G.I. Bill’s Legacy
Sometimes Cheryl and I talked about her seven months, about the wives left behind, about her family, her job, her boss. Sometimes she’d ask little questions. Sometimes I’d answer. And glad as I was to be in the States, and even though I hated the past seven months and the only thing that keep me going was the Marines I served with and the thought of coming home, I started feeling like I wanted to go back. Because fuck all this.
—from “Redeployment,” the title story in Phil Klay’s award-winning 2014 collection
The G.I. Bill (formally, the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act) was signed into law on June 22, 1944. Regarded as one of the most successful and far-reaching political measures in postwar America, the G.I. Bill provided a range of financial and educational support, and over the next decade almost 9 million veterans went to college or into training programs. When those veteran-students joined the workforce, getting the skilled jobs needed to support their growing families, the nation’s economic and social landscape was transformed. This portrait of the Greatest Generation, proudly returned from war and pursuing unlimited opportunities, is sometimes offered (for example in Suzanne Mettler’s Soldiers to Citizens) as the last available snapshot of a cohesive nation striding confidently towards domestic prosperity and international power.
Phil Klay served in the Marines, and after returning from Afghanistan used the G.I. Bill to get a degree in creative writing. His Redeployment transforms raw experience into fiction; in See Me for Who I Am we get the raw experience itself, as told by others who have studied under the G.I. Bill. The collection is the product of a veterans-only freshman seminar taught by David Chrisinger, a lecturer at University of Wisconsin−Stevens Point. Chrisinger describes the work of his student-veterans as an attempt to bridge the soldier-civilian divide by describing “what it’s actually like to be in the military, to go to war, and to come home.” In “The Fires That Mold Men into Weapons,” Chase Vuchetich traces his decision to enlist to his childhood memory of “sitting next to my dad at his reloading bench, where he would make ammunition and listen to George Thorogood and the Destroyers’ ‘Bad to the Bone.’ ” For a ten-year-old with a “warrior class” childhood, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center felt like “someone had just poured gasoline on my pile of wood.” He dropped out of high school in his junior year to join the Marines and was soon in Sangin, Afghanistan, his education there beginning with a late-night seminar from the soldiers he and the others were replacing — survivors going home the next day, giving a crash course in survival to the new recruits:
“I want you guys to understand.” He stared at the wall as the lights on our headlamps flickered. “You might have to kill women and children . . . Can you do that?” His fire was out; even with the light on his face, his eyes were black as if there was no soul left inside. He was twenty-one years old. His clothes were filthy and tattered. Although he couldn’t grow much more that a ratty mustache, he looked like an old man, tired and beaten down
In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger cites anthropological and behavioral evidence indicating that the most important factor in the readjustment process is not how a soldier responds to what he did in war but how his society responds to his return. The process of transitioning from a close-knit platoon back to life at home requires “social resilience” — a network of meaningful social connections, readily available in some communities (Junger offers kibbutz settlements in Israel as an example) but hard to find in America:
Resources are not shared equally, a quarter of children live in poverty, jobs are hard to get, and minimum wage is almost impossible to live on. Instead of being able to work and contribute to society — a highly therapeutic thing to do — a large percentage of veterans are just offered lifelong disability payments.
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The Islamic Road to the Modern World
In The Islamic Enlightenment, Christopher de Bellaigue aims to address a bias he perceives among general readers about the history of Islamic political liberalization. According to widespread assumptions, efforts to transform Islamic nations into modern societies were mainly imposed “from above” by Western-leaning autocrats—the underlying premise being that the Enlightenment was an exclusively Judeo-Christian (or post-Christian) movement that had no parallel in Islamic societies. This “historical fallacy,” in de Bellaigue’s view, has led “triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births,” to insist that “Islam [still] needs its Enlightenment.” By contrast, de Bellaigue argues convincingly that efforts to bring modern political ideas to the Muslim world had a “natural constituency” among the educated minority and that, despite opposition, they slowly gained general acceptance.
Facing Off with the Old Masters
One of the favorite sports of Renaissance artists was a contest called the paragone, the “comparison,” the age-old debate about the most expressive form of art. Like sport itself, the fun lay in playing the game with headlong passion, insisting that painting, or sculpture, or architecture reigned as queen of all the other arts. This spring and summer, the Florentine exhibition “Bill Viola: Electronic Renaissance,” organized around the work of the acclaimed American video artist Bill Viola, has brought the paragone into the twenty-first century.
Sig Nordal 