Plus: The Right to Asylum; Sjón; Discounting the Future; Olga Tokarczuk; Christopher Columbus
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Ariel Dorfman excoriates Pinochet’s Nazi assistant, and the people who enabled him; Mae Ngai investigates the campaign to end asylum in the US; Jessi Jezewska Stevens reads the weird fables of the Icelandic novelist Sjón; Geoff Mann discounts the discount rate; Christopher Tayler goes truffle-hunting through Olga Tokarczuk’s fiction; Francesca Wade dances with Lucinda Childs and Gertrude Stein; and, from the archives, Garry Wills on Christopher Columbus’s legacy. In 38 Londres Street Philippe Sands investigates a Nazi war criminal’s collaboration with the Chilean dictatorship’s system of repression, torture, and murder. The second Trump administration has undone the division between political and economic migrants. Did it make sense to separate them to begin with? Sjón’s Red Milk casts doubt on whether radicalization can ever be rationally narrated. The current discount rate means that the government views the long-term future of humanity as not metaphorically but literally worthless. In Olga Tokarczuk’s work, knowing how to pick mushrooms—organisms open to unruliness and interconnection and resistant to easy labeling—is a sign of good character. In her latest performance, the eighty-five-year-old dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs takes up one of her great influences: the work of Gertrude Stein. Free from the ArchivesFive hundred and thirty-three years ago today, Christopher Columbus landed on, most likely, what is now known as San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. In the Review’s November 21, 1991, issue, on the verge of the quincentennial of Columbus’s “discovery,” Garry Wills took the measure of the man and his voyage, finding someone very much of his time and place. Yet, Wills argued: we can no longer rest in a Eurocentric interpretation of Columbus. If it is necessary to put him back into his Renaissance setting in order to understand (if not condone) his ruthlessness, religiosity, and rapacity, we must also set him—as he could not do himself—in the “new world” he claimed to have found.
“It is absurd for people to remain pent up inside the prison of Columbus’s heart-stopping wonder. We can see some of what he was blind to. Yet some think that a refusal to accept his terms is a ‘pandering’ to politically correct attitudes about the original Americans. They fear that any motion toward ‘multiculturalism’ leads to an inevitable cultural relativism…. [But] multiculturalism is not a deviation from the study of one’s own world but a precondition of it. Who knows only one thing knows not even that.” Special Offer
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