National Gallery of Art, Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited *****

During our recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., a painting in Gallery 31 grabbed my attention: The Fortress of Königstein by Bernardo Bellotto. 

It was the fortress itself that first caught my eye, with its rugged walls and crumbling facades, but I found intriguing elements wherever I looked. A mine shaft! Shepherd's cabins! Is that rain in the distance? I stood close enough to the nearly eight-foot wide painting that I had to turn my head to look at the view toward the bluffs mirroring the fortress on the right.

I wasn't familiar with the artist or the location. The sense of discovery contributed to this painting overshadowing the Vermeers and Sargents in the gallery, for this visit at least.

Back at our hotel, I learned from the Internet that the painting was part of a set of five and that all five had been exhibited together just last year at the National Gallery in London. An exhibition catalog was available... for $8.50!

Not only did the catalog allow me to see reproductions of the other four views in the series, it also outlined Bellotto's career in a way that captured the life of a court painter in the eighteen century. In fewer than 100 pages, with copious illustrations, the book manages to provide a fascinating explanation of Bellotto's working methods, an historical account of the fortress, and insight into the art market as it tracks the provenance of the paintings.

The painting I saw in Washington is more properly titled The Fortress of Königstein from the North-West, to differentiate it from the other two external views (from the north and south-west). I appreciate that my painting is the one that "locates the fortress in its wider context."

Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy ***

American Spy starts right up with an action sequence:

I unlocked the safe beneath my desk, grabbed my old service automatic, and crept toward my bedroom door, stealthy until I was brought to grief by a Lego Duplo that stung the sole of my foot.

The first chapter effectively establishes Marie's character as a concerned mother and trained law enforcement officer who, as a black woman, is not your typical spy. The rest of the book alternates between describing her childhood and her first big clandestine operation spying on the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso.

American Spy aspires to be more than a spy thriller. A key theme of the childhood chapters is that black Americans are something like spies in their everyday lives: fitting in, trying to escape notice, while having distinct objectives from the society they keep. Wilkinson attempts to deepen the action sequences with philosophical concerns, but she doesn't (yet) have the writing chops to pull it off. The style and plotting are comparable to popular mystery novels. The characters are not well-rounded enough to support the ambiguities Wilkinson hopes to convey. Marie, for instance, seems to toggle between disciplined and naive, and her motivations remain murky. Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso, is a stereotype of a charismatic leader; Marie's sister Helene is supposed to be mysterious but seemed transparent to me.

I really liked the ideas in American Spy; I wish it had been better executed.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City ****

The Lonely City blends together personal narrative, art criticism, and psychology to explore the pervasiveness of loneliness and the ways that art can help both the artist and the audience to ameliorate it.

I was stunned and moved by Laing's empathic description of loneliness in the first full chapter, titled "Walls of Glass."  I was particularly struck by the moment when Laing dissolved into tears when she couldn't close the blinds at her sublet apartment:

It seemed too awful, I suppose, the idea that anyone could peer over and get a glimpse of me, eating cereal standing up or combing over emails, my face illuminated by the laptop's glare.

I think of loneliness as 'the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy," but Laing expands the concept by noting that lonely people are hyper-attentive to social threats and that a lack of understanding from others is just as causative as a lack of feeling.

Her descriptions of her various New York apartments are vivid and evocative. She makes the lurid scenes in 1970s Times Square and the docks seem life-affirming if not wholesome. 

Laing's main thesis is that loneliness drives the creation of art, and that art can help alleviate loneliness in the audience. During the middle section of the book, she shades into discussing full-blown outsider status, and her advocacy for marginalized communities becomes more typical. She returns to her subject at the end, arguing that art invests objects with feeling and noticing:

... a sense of the potential beauty in a frank declaration that one is human and as such subject to need... What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? ... We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell.

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi ***

I remember Clarke's previous book, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell, as an impressive feat of world-building: the writing style perfectly mimics Victorian novels, with the addition of magic. I was attracted to Piranesi by the prospect of its "mind-bending fantasy world, a vast labyrinth with infinite rooms and seas that sweep into halls and up staircases with the tides."

The first part of the book explores the "House" and introduces the two people who live in it: our narrator Piranesi and The Other, a well-dressed man who believes the House may provide access to long-lost Great and Secret Knowledge. I found myself thinking about the different attitudes that Piranesi and The Other had toward the mysteries of the House and what that might say about the human condition.

About a third of the way through, the focus shifts from the mysteries of the House to the mystery of the people. Who are Piranesi and The Other, and how did they come to be here? This shift gave the book more narrative drive but made it feel less thematically ambitious.

I have two criticisms.

• The House is said to represent (in part) a world that enters into conversations with humans, but we don't see much of that happening.
• As Piranesi learns about his past and the nature of the House, he doesn't really piece together clues but instead conveniently finds written records that lay it all out.

Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind ** 1/2

The Shipwrecked Mind considers the political reactionary. As Lilla says in the introduction:

Reactionaries are not conservatives. ... They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings. Millennial expectations of a redemptive new social order and rejuvenated human beings inspire the revolutionary; apocalyptic fears of entering a new dark age haunt the reactionary. ...
His story begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God. Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals challenge this harmony and ... a false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction.

The revolutionary imagines a mythical society of the future; the reactionary imagines a mythical society of the past. (A conservative, by contrast, imagines that we have not yet irreversibly abandoned the virtues of the golden age.)

I found the introduction quite stimulating in showing the deep affinities between revolutionaries and reactionaries. The rest of the book considers specific reactionary thinkers, mostly from the early 20th century. These men had different opinions about when things started to go wrong –– the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Socrates(!) –– and different prescriptions for getting back on track, but they all had a theory of history at least as compelling as Hegel's or Marx's.  (They were also all bad writers, if we can trust Lilla's assessment.) These chapters have their insights, but I wasn't really interested in the subjects themselves.

The author's biography identifies Mark Lilla as "a regular essayist for the New York Review of Books" and indeed the chapters of The Shipwrecked Mind all first appeared as standalone essays. The connection between the chapters is tenuous.

Christopher Kemp, Dark and Magical Places **

Dark and Magical Places is a non-fiction book about the neuroscience of navigation, "how the brain helps us to understand and navigate space," as it says on the inner flap. What a fascinating subject! Written by a scientist! With a nicely chosen title!

Kemp admits up front that he has a very poor sense of direction, has difficulty creating a cognitive map. Unfortunately, this shortcoming impairs his ability to help me create a cognitive map of the subject area. He guides us past place cells, head-direction cells, grid cells, the retrospenial cortex, and the parahippocampal place area (PPA), but I would fail the route-integration task of determining how they relate to one another. 

Kemp has the tendency to wander aimlessly between subjects. More problematic, though, is that I don't trust his explanations. He will introduce a topic with an unlikely sounding proclamation (head-direction cells have a firing pattern that correlates with your "absolute direction, independent of location"). After a couple of pages describing the experiment that lead to the discovery, he expands on the topic in ways that don't deepen the simple picture so much as undermine it ("if the postcard was taken from the north-facing wall of the rat's environment and placed on the south-facing wall, a head-direction cell that previously had been tuned to north suddenly only fired when the rat pointed south"). 

The book cries out for illustrations, showing navigational strategies and brain topography. In the first chapter Kemp discusses the schematic map of the London Underground from 1931 and compares it to the "geographically more accurate" previous maps, but we don't see either map.

As a framing device, the book uses the story of Amanda Eller, a hiker who in 2019 got lost "on the northwest slopes of the volcano Haleakalā [in] Maui's rugged interior." In the final chapter, we hear that Eller ended up far outside the search area: "one mile further northwest and she's have hit the Oahu coastline." That is really lost!

Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob ****

Reading The Books of Jacob is a somewhat intimidating proposition. It is a 900+ page historical novel that takes place in eighteenth-century Podolia (then part of Poland, now Ukraine), about a real-life charismatic religious leader who lead his Jewish followers to convert to Christianity. It features hundreds of characters with (hard-for-Americans-to-pronounce) Eastern European names –– and these characters all change their names halfway through the book. Its heft, both literal and literary, supposedly won Tokarczuk her Nobel Prize. 

Especially in its early sections, The Books of Jacob is an immersive experience. Tokarczuk is excellent at describing towns and settlements in a way that captures how their residents experience them.

Nahman sees a little cottage, stooped beneath a cap of straw thatch, with tiny little windows, rotted boards; beyond it looms others with the same stoop, stuck together like the cells of a honeycomb. And he knows that there is a whole network of passages and walkways and nooks and crannies where carts of wood sit, waiting to be unloaded. And there are courtyards bordered by low fences, atop which during the day clay pots heat up in the sun. Beyond that lie passages that lead to other courtyards so small you can barely turn around in them, each faced with three doors that lead to different homes. Higher up are attics linking the tops of those little homes, full of pigeons that mark out time with layers of droppings––living clocks. In gardens the size of an overcoat spread out on the ground cabbage leaves struggle to coil, potatoes swell, carrots cling to their beds. It would be wasteful to devote space to flowers other than hollyhocks, which grow straight up. Now, in December, their naked stalks seem to support the houses. Along the little streets the trash heap extends to the fences, guarded by cats and feral dogs. And so it goes through the whole village, along the streets, through the orchards and the bounds of the fields to the river, where the women busily rinse out all the filth of the settlement.

The religious material is less clear, appropriately since Jacob's theology derives from the mystic Kabbalah. When Moses came down from the mountain to find the Israelites debauching themselves, he destroyed the God-given laws and replaced them with a new set designed to control his people. The remnants of the true law were spread across the monotheistic religions, to be reassembled by a Messiah as the end times approach.

If The Books of Jacob were a film, it would be presented almost entirely in scene-setting medium shots. Tokarczuk rarely favors characters with close-ups; this is not a psychological novel but a social one.

Inevitably, I had to drag myself through certain sections of this very long book. But every section has unexpected insights, perspectives, or turns of phrase. I admired the book more than loved it, but admire it I did.