The New York Review of Books

Matthew Aucoin is a composer and conductor, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. His book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera will be published in paperback in March. Vanessa Barbara, a Brazilian journalist, is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and the author of two novels and two nonfiction books in Portuguese. Christopher Benfey is the Mellon Professor of English Emeritus at Mount Holyoke. His most recent book is If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. T. H. Breen is the author of several books on the American Revolution, most recently The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America. Andrew Butterfield is the President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts and a Fellow at the Italian Academy at Columbia. He is the author of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio,…

Edward Hopper’s New York an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by Kim Conaty, with essays by Kirsty Bell, Darby English, and David Hartt, and contributions by David Crane, Jennie Goldstein, Melinda Lang, and Farris Wahbeh. Whitney Museum of American Art, 255 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) “Edward Hopper’s New York,” the sumptuous exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gives us one more chance to retire—at least for a decent interval—those once glamorous words that have come to dominate, and increasingly suffocate, our experience of Hopper’s paintings: alienation, loneliness, voyeurism, the uncanny. Such neon abstractions give us the illusion that we have dispelled the puzzlement we often feel in front of Hopper’s strange…

A truism for our times: a story doesn’t need to be factual to go viral. In June 2020, not long into the Covid-19 pandemic, an Instagram user shared a video of a mustachioed man wearing floral shorts and a cropped tank top, pouring himself some beer at a crowded bar in Santos, a coastal city in southeastern Brazil. According to the caption, the man was Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. He had apparently decided to break the quarantine by ditching his shoes and dancing to a forró song called “Já que me ensinou a beber” (Since You Taught Me to Drink). Of course, it wasn’t the director of the WHO in the video, which was actually recorded before the start of the pandemic. Nonetheless it circulated…

All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything by Claire Harman. London: Chatto and Windus, 295 pp., £18.99 Kathleen Beauchamp was a shape-shifter with as many selves as Stendhal. Her pseudonyms included Katya, Katerina, Kissienka, Katoushka (the Russian variations of her name); her Maori personae were Kezia, Rewa, Tui, and Maata; she also referred to herself as Kass, Katharina, Kathë Schonfeld, Mrs. K. Bendall, Kathë Beauchamp-Bowden, Juliet, Vere, Ariadne, Sally, Pearl, and Guy; and she published stories, poems, reviews, and editorials under the names Lili Heron, Julian Mark, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, the Tiger, Boris Petrovsky, K. M., and Katherine Mansfield. “True to oneself!” she scoffed in a journal entry. Which self? Which of my many—well, really, thats what it looks like coming to—hundreds of selves. For what with complexes and suppressions…

Corresponding with Carlos: A Biography of Carlos Kleiber by Charles Barber. Scarecrow, 365 pp., $131.00; $53.00 (paper) Carlos Kleiber: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon 12 CDs and 1 Blu-ray disc (2018) The two most substantial documents of the conductor Carlos Kleiber’s career released in recent years—the epistolary biography Corresponding with Carlos by Charles Barber and Kleiber’s Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon—have a notable feature in common: Kleiber, who died in 2004, would surely not have wanted either to see the light of day. Conductors tend to be acutely conscious of their legacies, which may be embodied both in the cultural institutions they lead and the recordings they leave behind. But the German-Argentine Kleiber, a once-in-a-century comet of conducting talent, had nothing but disdain for legacy-building: one of his lifelong mottos, according to his sister, Veronika, was the ancient…

The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty by Natalie Livingstone. St. Martin’s, 461 pp., $39.99 In 1861 Charlotte Rothschild and her son Natty (the future 1st Lord Rothschild) left their mansion in Piccadilly for a summer holiday in Grasmere. Hotels in the Lake District at that time had a cannon on the balcony to “wake the echoes” from the surrounding mountains, and tourists would go out on boats and call out “the names of loved ones.” The Rothschilds, a very public, much-reported-on family, preferred not to set the echoes resounding with their relatives’ names. Instead they called out “the names of characters in Great Ex pectations,” which was being serialized. This nice vignette—about two kinds of Victorian fame—would have been even more pleasing if they had called out the…