Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.
—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor
From Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket):
Chimpanzee societies wage war against each other. Crows make and use tools. Dolphins talk to each other and talk about us. They have different dialects and various synonyms for “human” (some of them are slurs). Language, as such, is not what distinguishes us from other creatures that roam the earth. Nor is it intelligence. Sentiments—complex, sophisticated sentiment—it is said, are what make humans unique. How we refine or distort our emotions, codify them into structures, how we systematize our layered and recursive interior lives, how we immortalize our fleeting expressions into art, policy, or poison is what makes us stand out. Or so we tell ourselves.
In the framework of humanization, Palestinians are not entirely deprived of “uniquely human emotions,” however, the Palestinian’s affective allowance—the range of sentiments one is permitted to express openly—is extremely restricted and shrinks with every perceived “wrongdoing.” We are allowed to be hospitable (Yosef Weitz, the “Architect of Transfer,” wrote in his diary about the unsuspecting Palestinians who served him food and welcomed him in homes he later stole). We are implored to be peaceful (or submissive) and forbearing, and we are tolerated when we are. We are meek and we shall inherit no earth. What we are not allowed is the future: we cannot be ambitious or cunning; we cannot aspire to sovereignty or revenge. We are robbed of the right to complexity, to contradictory feelings, the right to “contain multitudes.” Our sadness is without teeth. Perhaps we can be bitter (see: “Palestinian Rejectionism”), but belligerence and hostility—foreign concepts to our oppressors, apparently—exile us outside of humanity once more. The only thing we are permitted to look forward to is the day’s end.
From Tove Jansson’s novel Sun City (NYRB Classics), translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal:
There are more hairdressers in St. Petersburg than anywhere else in the country, and they are specialists at creating airy little puffs of thin white hair. Hundreds of old ladies stroll between the palm trees with white curls covering their heads. There are fewer gentlemen, however. In the guesthouses, they all have their own rooms, or they share with another person—some of them for only a short time in the even, healthful climate, but most of them for as long as they have left. No one is sick, that is, not in the normal sense of sick in bed. Such matters are attended to incredibly swiftly by ambulances that never sound their sirens. There are lots of squirrels in the trees, not to mention the birds, and all these animals are tame to the point of impudence. A lot of stores carry hearing aids and other therapeutic devices. Signs in clear, bright colors announce immediate blood pressure checks on every block and offer all sorts of information about such things as pensions, cremation, and legal problems. In addition, the shops have put a lot of thought into offering a wide selection of knitting patterns, yarns, games, crafts materials, and the like, and their customers can be sure of a friendly and helpful reception. Those who wander down the avenue toward the bay or up toward the City Park and the church meet no children and no hippies and no dogs. Only on the weekends are the pier and the bay front filled with people, who have come to this attractive city to look at the movie ship, Bounty. Then the beaches are lively and colorful, and only at dusk do the last cars drive away.
From Rachel Hope Cleves’s Lustful Appetites (Polity), a history of good food and immoral sex:
The English-born demimondaine Cora Pearl, who became famous in Paris for her marvelous equestrianism as she rode out mornings in the Bois de Boulogne, rivaled Marie Duplessis in her love for fine food. Pearl could frequently be found in the private rooms of restaurants. Auguste Escoffier, the most celebrated French chef of the nineteenth century, cooked for her at Le Petit Moulin Rouge, the first restaurant he worked at in Paris. He invented a dish that he called Noisettes d’Agneau Cora, which was lamb served within artichoke hearts, a pun on the term coeur d’artichaut used for men who fell in love with every woman they met. On another occasion, Escoffier created a menu for Pearl and a young lover that included a dish of pigeon en cocotte, another French pun: a pigeon was a word for a sucker, and a cocotte meant a courtesan. Escoffier described Pearl as “particularly talented in the art of plucking these little birds.” Sometimes the little birds took offense. In 1872, the grandson of the proprietor of France’s first restaurant chain, the Bouillons Duval, accidentally shot himself at Pearl’s apartment (he meant to shoot her), leading to her temporary exile from Paris. This incident did little to temper her extravagance. According to a famous story, Cora Pearl once had herself served up naked, garnished with a few sprigs of parsley, on an enormous silver platter in the Grand Seize room at the Café Anglais.
From a story about the last days of Oscar Wilde in Rupert Everett’s first short-story collection, The American No (Atria Books):
“You know,” he says finally, “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life.”
“Oh, yes?”
“In this room. At this moment. The light from the street!”
“What light?” The young god has finished his ablutions, dries his hands on his trousers, and sets to work tipping granules of cocaine from a small envelope into two wads of cotton wool.
“What light? It carves you in marble, dear boy. We are lost in our own world. Shrouded in a symphony of adjacent copulation.”
He sits up with a sigh and reaches for the pocketbook inside his coat, and extracts money.
“I know you love me, Johnny. Even though our purple moments are sullied by green notes.”
From Jade Scott’s Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots (Pegasus Books), a description of sixteenth-century data protection strategies:
Different processes of letter-locking were employed, with letters being sewn shut, or slices of paper taken from the page and used to pierce the folded letter, almost like a key in a lock. Wax seals were then placed over the slits or holes to offer further security. Mary was known to use some of the most secure ways of folding and sealing her letters, reflecting her awareness of Walsingham’s surveillance and interception. She often used a system called the spiral lock, where a slice of paper from the centre of the page was threaded through multiple slits. If the letter was opened by someone before it reached the intended recipient, then it would be impossible to close it again without the damage showing. These features of the letters are easily overlooked by modern readers because once the letter was opened, the piece of paper that made up the lock was often discarded. We know that Mary used the spiral lock on one of her final letters prepared the night before her execution.
