RaveThe New York Review of BooksManzoni embeds his sources in his text—citations from the gride and old chronicles such as Giuseppe Ripamonti’s Historia patria. The result is not only a historical novel but a kind of historiographical novel that invites the reader to enter the dynamic of reading and writing history ... What we get is not only an evocation of past languages of authority attempting to order a messy reality but an interpretive sociolinguistic game of high stakes. It’s a startling new way to write history within fiction. The novel from its start becomes polyphonic or what one can call, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, \'heteroglossic\'—a linguistic theater with a multisided clash of voices. Readers find themselves caught up in a drama of heteroglossia that propels not only the plot but the entire historical resurrection that Manzoni attempts ... Michael F. Moore’s new version strikes me as remarkable, extraordinarily well pitched, finding the right levels of colloquialism and eloquence. Moore preserves the heteroglossia of the novel, its rich impasto of spoken and written styles whose incompatibility is one of its deep subjects. And he manages to catch Manzoni’s narrative voice, which is not easy to characterize: a confluence of an ironic worldly wisdom, a Jansenist pessimism, an immense pity for the follies of mankind, a respect for the peasant and the laborer, and contempt for those who have power and turn it to bad ends.
Alex Ross
RaveBook PostThe first time I sat through Wagner’s complete Ring cycle, early in the 1990s, the neighboring seats held a planeload of Germans who had come over for the Met’s version because it was more to their taste than the modernizing Regietheater dominant in various German cities ... And when the last glorious notes of Götterdämmerung had faded away, they were on their feet, cheering wildly for the conductor, James Levine. In my own mythologization of the moment, I was surrounded by Prussians applauding the great Jewish conductor. And that, I thought, was the Wagner story all along: unlikelihood and contradiction that can never be resolved. It’s one of the many merits of Alex Ross’s new book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, that he doesn’t try to resolve these contradictions. He instead lays out what Richard Wagner has meant over two centuries in all its paradoxical complexities ... Not only is Ross—as readers of The New Yorker, where he is a long-time critic, know—an expert and evocative guide to the music, he proves as well a persuasive intellectual historian. His book is an extraordinary undertaking ... Ross makes his book a compendium, and any future discussion of the topic will have to return to it. I found myself wishing it had been reduced in size and given a firmer architecture: the wish to include absolutely everything that might be said about Wagner’s permeation of modern culture tends to make everything seem of equal importance. Reading the book has something of the endlessness of Wagner’s music.
Tom Reiss
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksTom Reiss in The Black Count has given a clear account of the origins of the Dumas dynasty, including detailed work on the French sugar empire in Saint-Domingue—the most lucrative of European colonies in the Caribbean. Reiss traces complex patterns of racial mixture on the island—the separate castes formed by slaves, free blacks, mulattos, and whites—that would be made even more volatile with the coming of the French Revolution and the abolition of slavery by act of the Convention in 1794 ... Reiss, whose research seems to have involved cracking a safe with the cooperation of the deputy mayor of Villers- Cotterêts to get at Dumas family documents, is so taken with the background he painstakingly assembles that the reader tends to get a bit lost in the welter of detail. When he gets to the events of his central story, things become plain enough. We are in the swashbuckling world that Alex’s son would draw on for his fiction.
