Here are some more articles from the NYRB that I've enjoyed reading. From the May 23 issue: a review of the French movie Non-Fiction directed by Olivier Assayas (because of the connection to Paris in general and the Parisian world of publishing in general) and of the 1978 Spanish novel Valley of the Fallen by Carlos Rojas now translated by Edith Grossman (because of my own interest in the Spanish Civil War, although the book doesn't specifically cover that period and instead focuses on the early nineteenth century where Rojas portrays the relationship between acclaimed painter Francisco de Goya and the despot King Fernando VII, and the final years of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorship in the 1970s).
I like many articles in the NYRB but I only save a few of them and another one I saved is a review of the biography of modern artist Sophie Taueber-Arp, 1889-1943 (reviewed by Jed Perl, the author of one of my favorite books, New Art City, about art and culture in New York City around the middle of the century), that one from the March 7 issue. Taeuber-Arp is widely considered as one of the most important artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Dallas' Nasher Sculpture Center has a wonderful half-hour YouTube video about her collaboration with her husband Jean Arp, which you can watch below.
But the NYRB isn't only the biweekly print edition - it is also a remarkable blog where some of the posts rival or exceed contributions in the print magazine. I am thinking for instance about Jhumpa Lahiri's piece on the novel Beyond Babylon by Igiaba Scego (Lahiri now writes in Italian and was on leave from her creative writing position at Princeton for 2018-19, a year she spent living in Rome) and a memoir-like essay by Anastasia Edel about her mother's life as a piano teacher at the Institute of Culture in the agricultural city of Krasnodar, back in the days of the Soviet Union, with all the party intrigues one can imagine - and to think that her mother passed up a chance to study at the Moscow Conservatory under Dmitry Shostakovich, a friend of the family, to marry a man she divorced only a few years later and end up in that city. (Given my interest in Russia and the former Soviet Union, I always read everything connected to Russia from start to finish.) I
Another great piece by Anastasia Edel is about my favorite composer, Dmitry Shostakovich, and an episode where he composed music for a ceremony in Novossibirsk to commemorate the city's liberation from the Germans in September 1943. City officials wanted to add sounds to the Flame of Eternal Glory and thus petitioned the Composers' Union. The petition, which landed on Shostakovich's desk, was signed by the author's grandfather, and Edel makes those months of 1943 come vividly alive. (Shostakovich reused the opening of his entry for the USSR anthem competition, which he had lost.) The author's mother, discussed in the other essay, also makes an appearance, in particular when she wants to make Shostakovich's Babi Yar her thesis project, a matter Shostakovich advised her to drop because of the controversy surrounding the symphony in the Soviet Union, and the author also shares her own admiration at her grandfather and the famous musician who was a friend of the family, through two photographs her mother kept in the apartment. "What I did gain from Shostakovich’s invisible presence in the cramped khrushchevka apartment in which I grew up was the sense of tantalizing proximity to genius and history and to the men who made it—one with music, another with the monument that enshrined it. Both still awe me." One can only hope she is going to put all of her memories into a book some day soon.
