N1BR

nplusone — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:11:29 -0700

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Welcome to the online book review supplement to n+1 magazine. To read more of the best unpublishable writing by today's best unpublished writers, please consider subscribing to the print magazine.

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N1BR: Issue 6

nplusone — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:43:17 -0800

Ken Burns
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Charles Petersen

To vacation like a king, in a land no king can own, is nonetheless to expose the poverty of everyday democratic life. A trip to the parks becomes a Cinderella tale with no prince but rather a long drive home at the end. As one of Burns' favorite rangers declares, "Transcendent experience is commonplace in Yosemite … And where else can you get an experience like that?"

Rebecca Solnit
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Nikil Saval

For a book so concerned with empathy and altruism, A Paradise Built in Hell is filled with enemies. They appear most often in the form of spectral masses, which, like the "extraordinary communities" in disasters, suddenly emerge to defend the status quo: congealed privilege and hypercapitalist exploitation. What Solnit admires is what we might call "the people," as in the Spanish pueblo or Mandarin renmin—those authentically popular but hitherto disenfranchised groups in whose name the revolution will be made—while the phantom bad groups are "the media, public opinion, and the bureaucrats and politicians," who show up on cue to disrupt the "people's" carnivalesque utopia.

Stieg Larsson
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Ian MacDougall

There are so many corrupt men who hate women in every corner of Larsson's Sweden that to present them all in a concise manner would be impossible. They range from editors of major dailies to the members of Scandinavia's ubiquitous biker gangs to police to lawyers to medical doctors to criminal masterminds right out of a Roger Moore-era James Bond film. The one thing that unites this mélange of women-hating crooks is that the welfare state sponsors or at least supports their crimes. The state itself is the greatest villain.

Norwegian Novels
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Silje Bekeng

There are a few obvious reasons why rural society (or lack of society) takes up so much space in our literature. The literary magazine Avsagd Hagle once did a tongue-in-cheek analysis of contemporary Norwegian poetry and found a surprisingly high frequency of the words "hand,""bird," and "tree." The reason, the editors argued, must be that poets are sitting at their desks, alternately staring at their own hands, the trees outside their windows, and the birds in the trees.

N1BR: Issue 5

nplusone — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:58:52 -0800

Caleb Crain
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Marco Roth

There is scarcely an entry in which one doesn't learn something, no matter how trivial, as well as feel the author's own joy at learning the same thing. Call this the real 'democratic' potential of the blog. One's only credentials are one's seriousness, measured not by tone, rhetoric, or degrees conferred, but by the pains one is willing to take, especially during unsupervised hours.

Matthew Crawford
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Gideon Lewis-Kraus

There is something to be said for the ability to fix one's own car. But that competence gives you a specific handhold in the world, not a necessary one. There are a lot of good-citizen non-narcissists who live in cities and frankly couldn't care less about fixing a motorcycle. A serious conversation over time with an admired friend—or a recalcitrant one—can, and ought to, do the same thing for one's relationship to the not-self. The difference is that people are messy and sometimes they don't shut up. Also, you can tinker with them as much as you want, but you're unlikely to make them go faster.

Brooklyn Gentrification Novels
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Elizabeth Gumport

As fixated as they are on the appearances of their houses, characters in early gentrification novels recognize that there are consequences to their labor. The newcomers are not immune to guilt. Whether or not they believe that what they are doing is wrong, they know others despise them for it, and with this knowledge comes fear of retribution.

Cătălin Avramescu
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Justin E. H. Smith

The decline of the cannibal as a meaningful figure might not, or not only, signal the decline of the old moral universe; it might signal that the natives are no longer restless, and they are no longer restless because they are now subdued by the overwhelming force of the colonial powers, by urbanization, ghettoization, alcohol, and corn syrup. One sign of their subdued state is the dirty pink sweatpants they are wearing; another is the traveler's confidence that he will not be eaten.

N1BR: Issue 4

nplusone — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:54:45 -0700

Charles Taylor
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Bruce Robbins

Taylor's respect for human feeling sometimes seems almost pathological. Yet there are all sorts of feelings that don't get respected nearly enough. One does not have to take a rosy Thomas Friedman-like view of contemporary capitalism to feel that Taylor has not done enough fieldwork among women or young people—that he is willfully blind to the various forms of good feeling that are both secular and at least as characteristic of our contradictory modernity as "malaise."

Michéle Lamont
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Amanda Claybaugh

The two unsuccessful disciplines are philosophy, which Lamont calls a "problem field," and English, which she claims is in crisis. Both fail to secure their share of fellowships because they fail to describe themselves in ways that other disciplines find persuasive. For English, the problem is that the discipline is too open. "I am coming from English," one panelist says, "and in English today anything goes."

Zoë Heller and Said Sayrafiezadeh
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Atossa Abrahamian

The Litvinoffs live in a comfortable West Village bubble punctuated with laughable criticisms from the right-wing press, but their seemingly sincere conviction that socialism will bring about greater social justice is what saves them from coming off as utterly reprehensible. It is clear that Heller sees the contradictions of leftist politics becoming an American lifestyle, but these are approached with wry humor, not contempt.

James Cuno and Lawrence Rothfield
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Alexander Bevilacqua

Encyclopedic museums are in no way intrinsically enlightening forces. They are only as good as their curators, and they can be and have been used to tell rather unappealing stories about the ranking of human societies. To reduce the history of the museum or even the encyclopedic art museum to a simple story of enlightenment and the championing of pluralist, democratic values is either an act of ignorance, which one doubts, or disingenuousness.

April Bernard
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Abigail Deutsch

Despite moments of despair, Bernard is pleasingly prone to clowning around. In Romanticism, she provides a series of fake translations of fake operas by fake composers. Few audience members, I imagine, would survive Claude DuFarge's "The Cossack's Bride" beyond intermission.

On Writing
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Arnon Grunberg

The book has its faults, yet I can still recommend it heartily to one and all. It is about seduction as a game, and the ironic fact that the game more or less ceases to be a game as soon as one starts taking it seriously. It is about the power of the word and the negation of the cliché, at the moment when the cliché is used to a different end and so takes on a new ambiguity. Perhaps it is also about how, if one looks carefully, almost everything boils down to the art of seduction, even though that art often presents itself in a different guise.

N1BR: Issue 3

nplusone — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:31:39 -0700

Walter Kirn
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Christian Lorentzen

Kirn the con man (and stud) is also Kirn the victim—thrust by the system of standardized tests into bubble-filling displays of aptitude, by his poststructuralist professors into jargon-loaded ballets of meaninglessness, and by class-induced self-loathing into drug abuse. Kirn stretches this pose to its logical epiphanic extreme: he never really read a book until he escaped Princeton.

Mark Rudd
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Nikil Saval

We should worry that the calculated withdrawal may have become an equally calculated reinsertion; that our current President, who roused so many of the youth from slothful indecision to convulsive activity, has vindicated public institutions that we were once right to despise. But we should not worry that our efforts pale in comparison to a past generation, whose insights into our present are great, but limited.

Edgardo Vega Yunqué
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Jessica Weisberg

Posthumous insults are usually directed toward the rich or famous, but Vega was neither of the two. Just months before he died, he was so low on cash that he gave up his apartment in Sunset Park for a tiny room—so tiny, in fact, that before he moved he euthanized his cat.

Clancy Martin
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Edward Morgan Day Frank

In his search for prosperity and happiness, Bobby is inevitably drawn to the US, to Dallas, where his older brother Jim works at a jewelry store. The life of a salesman is alluring and glamorous, and it isn't long—actually, it's the moment Bobby steps off the plane—before Jim whisks him away in a white Cadillac limousine and gives him lots and lots of cocaine.

Dilip Hiro
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Isaac Scarborough

Uzbeks, like most Central Asians, certainly do take their tea with sugar, and have no seasonal discrimination between green and black teas, as Hiro claims. I have no idea where he came up with the notion of taking nan—the standard flat bread—and sprinkling it with salt, and having eaten plov of numerous variations in four different Central Asian countries, I would expect that Hiro’s recipe, involving, oddly, apples, prunes, and tomatoes, would scandalize a great number of cooks in the region.

John Cheever
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Michael Lindgren

There's a feeling I get, when I'm tired, elated, or emotionally drained, of life for a split-second seeming close-up, tragic, and hard, yet far away, fundamentally comical, and droll. It's a powerful feeling, poignant and ennobling, and I learned how to have it by reading John Cheever.

The Internet
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Benjamin Kunkel

During the short-lived Diet-Coke-and-Mentos craze of a few years ago (it seems the substances combine like nitrogen and glycerin), I was cheered by going on YouTube to see Americans harmlessly blowing things up in disused weekend parking lots: it is not often that the American fantasies of pure destructiveness and pure innocence are so beguilingly combined.

N1BR: Issue 2

nplusone — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:50:58 -0700

Charlotte Roche
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Justin E. H. Smith

If Roche has hit on something true and heretofore unsaid, it is that to write about bodily fluids is not to describe something exceptional in the course of human life. It is rather to describe something that is always there and always felt to be there, through all those other things people do and experience at that level that used to be the subject of novels (falling in love, challenging others to duels, talking about the buying and selling of land, etc.).

Alex Ross
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Nikil Saval

What Adorno gave us in his many writings on new music was a way of seeing history in a piece of music where it might be most absent. It was a way of trying to do what Ross is reluctant to do: understand and define progress in the arts. Ross divests himself of a correlate way of explaining history—at least, history that is not totalitarian or "New Deal" era history—and so we stop hearing the 20th century in the music.

Roberto Bolaño
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Giles Harvey

Bolaño seems to be throwing his hands up in the face of the horrors he describes: he can make no more sense of them than the characters in his book. I have suggested that the book is a failure. Yet to call it a failure seems somehow tautological: Bolaño's imagination was underwritten by the idea that every human impulse is ultimately thwarted, cancelled, and destroyed.

Anne Rice
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Rachel Aviv

Rice's tales were embraced as allegories for gay life: alienated and often genderless, her vampires were initiated into a secret subculture in which they could finally be free. They perpetuated their species by sucking the blood of mortals—a tender interaction that left them trembling with arousal.

Per Petterson
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Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

Petterson takes profound pleasure in descriptions of physical labor and the basic mechanics of the body. There are extended scenes of felling woods for timber, of threshing hay, of lighting worn stoves and cooking potatoes and systematically setting tables. He is methodical, and he makes manual activity exquisitely sensual.

John Updike
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Nathan Heller

Updike is often cast as a chronicler of the American middle. To describe him that way, though, is to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Updike wrote about people like Updike, and it was his stroke of luck that as the Sixties unfolded, people like Updike—old enough to have a settled vision of the world, young enough to change, suburban enough to care about the Sunday congregation more than, say, hipster ontology—became not just a middle ground but a national thermometer.

N1BR: Issue One

nplusone — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

From the Editors

Neil Gross's Richard Rorty
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Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Richard Rorty is less a book about Rorty than it is a book about the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. More precisely—or, more optimistically—it is a book about why it might be a problem for sociologists to continue to labor in his shadow, and how one might get out from under it.

Christine Schutt and Gordon Lish
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Carla Blumenkranz

It has been more than ten years since Lish retired, and many of his writers have continued to publish. There is something to study in the ways they have found to proceed with their careers. In Schutt's second novel, the cast of characters stays the same but the narrator is transformed.

The Complete Centerfolds
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Molly Young

My favorite Playboy centerfold is Miss September 1983, dressed for a college football game in striped socks and a tartan scarf. She has a flask, a fuzzy wool cap, and a team pennant. She is naked. It sounds funny, but somehow there's nothing funny about the photograph. Is laughter an anti-aphrodisiac?

Marilynne Robinson
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Charles Petersen

You don't have to be Christian to appreciate Robinson—her work, while close to theology, comes down on the side of poetry—but a knowledge of the faith's dying words may be required to get her meaning. In this I doubt she's much different from many of the great Jewish writers of the past half-century, believers and apostates alike.

Tony Judt
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Saul Austerlitz

You would be forgiven, upon reading the panoply of negative reviews of Judt's Reappraisals, for thinking his latest book was a screed, a Kassam rocket of scorn and derision directed at the state of Israel by a confirmed anti-Zionist.

Reality Publishing
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Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

I tried to justify the contest and my participation in it. After all, I thought, the public voting might encourage reading in a fun way. But none of it quite worked; I still felt queasy. It was probably out of guilt that I began to check the message boards.