One of the running jokes in On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, is that its main character is philosophically opposed to beauty. Howard Belsey is a professor of art history at Wellington College, and like all middle-aged professors in campus novels, he is a ludicrous figure--unfaithful to his wife, disrespected by his children, and, of course, unable to finish the book he has been talking about for years. In Howard’s case, the book is meant to be a demolition of Rembrandt, whose canvases he sees as key sites for the production of the Western ideology of beauty.
Another nice bit from that Vogue piece--this one about Hillary's ill-tempered moment in the Congo a few weeks ago:
The Thing Around Your Neck
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Knopf, 218 pp., $24.95)
In “Jumping Monkey Hill,” the most wicked story in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection, a group of young writers selected from all over Africa have gathered for a workshop at a fancy resort outside Cape Town--”the kind of place,” thinks Ujunwa, the representative Nigerian, “where . . . affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa.” The workshop is run by a white couple of a familiar type: liberal expats who proclaim their attachment to their new home a bit too loudly. (“White people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same--condescending,” Adichie writes in another story.) The wife compliments Ujunwa’s bone structure and asks if she is descended from royalty: “The first thing that came to Ujunwa’s mind was to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London.” The smarmy husband makes lewd remarks to the women and speaks pompously of his own authority on Africa.
Living in Rwanda After the Genocide By Jean Hatzfeld (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 242 pp., $25)
The Antelope’s Strategy:
Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda By Lee Ann Fujii (Cornell University Press, 212 pp., $29.95)
After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post- Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond Edited by Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman (Columbia University Press, 399 pp., $50)
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster By Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 353 pp., $27.95)
I.
The subject of catastrophe invites the high eloquence of writers, the explanatory power of historians, and the deepest empathy of ordinary people. But the aftermath of catastrophe--that is not yet a subject to which many people kindle. Most of us prefer to back away from the scene of torment, with its inconsolable survivors and its insoluble problems. The survivors, though, cannot back away. They continue to live where the others died. Jean Améry, tortured at Auschwitz, wrote powerfully about the world’s readiness to isolate the survivor, who is unable to join in “the peace chorus all around him, which cheerfully proposes: not backward let us look but forward, to a better, common future.”
One Monday last December, a stranger presented himself at the office of Sanford Ungar, the president of Goucher College, located in a suburb of Baltimore. He introduced himself as Charlie Ebersol, a television producer. A handsome, affable, and royally confident young man--he was sometimes pictured in the gossip pages with his girlfriend, the tennis star Maria Sharapova--Ebersol explained his visit by saying he was doing research for a new prime-time show on NBC. Beyond that, he was cryptic, Ungar recalls. "He said, 'We're going to come back tomorrow and tell you about somebody who works here who's done some very, very bad things.'" The meeting, Ungar says, left him totally baffled. Ebersol remembers the encounter somewhat differently. "Literally five minutes into my going into conversation," Ebersol told me, "he said, 'Are you talking about Leopold Munyakazi?'"
During her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton's husband Bill promised the electorate that it would get "two for the price of one" if she was elected. She didn't demur, at least not in public.
But she also wasn't elected. She was appointed secretary of state by the winning candidate Barack Obama.
Tuesday's Boston Globe had in it an Associated Press dispatch that speculates about her feeling crowded by the president's frequent flyer international travel, by vice president Joe Biden's foreign assignments and what must be a nightmare for her, the designation of independent and high-powered individuals as special envoys to the most combustible areas in the world. Like Richard Holbrooke to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Truly high-powered. And George Mitchell. OK, not so high-powered. He will enter the history books as a failure, twice over. But that's another story.
As the AP put it, even on her visit to Africa, Hillary "couldn't escape his outsized shadow." By which it meant her husband and his visit with Kim Jung Il in Pyongyang. A university student had asked what Bill thought about some big Chinese loan to the Democratic Republic of Congo (which, by the way, is neither democratic nor a republic.). She was not cool in response: "My husband is not secretary of state, I am." AP says "she snapped." And then went on: "You want me to tell you what me husband thinks? If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channelling my husband." She was a bit irritable, don't you think?
Everyone will spend the day fixating on Hillary's moment of annoyance in Congo yesterday (it's the 'wood' of today's New York Post, of course), which ultimately seems to have been prompted by a mistranslation.
(Credit: Andrew McConell/WpN)
I.
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
(HarperFlamingo, 546 pp., $26)
