THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 65
BRIEFLY NOTED
Five Days Gone, by Laura Cumming (Scribner). In the fall of
1929, the author’s mother, as a three-year-old, was kidnapped
from a beach in Lincolnshire, and held for five days. Who
took her and why are the mysteries that drive this vivid mem-
oir, in which our contemporary eagerness for transparency
clashes with Victorian ideals of secrecy and restraint. Grad-
ually, as the author visits those who knew her mother as a girl,
it becomes clear that many were aware of the truth of her dis-
appearance, yet chose to keep it to themselves. Cumming, an
art critic, anchors her story to references from art and litera-
ture, exploring the shaping of identity and what makes us “be-
long” to the people and places that call us their own.
This Land, by Christopher Ketcham ( Viking). In this encyclo-
pedic exposé, a veteran environmental journalist uses darkly
humorous stories to illuminate the political, ideological, and
physical threats to America’s parks, forests, rivers, and mon-
uments. The author’s focus is on the misdeeds carried out
“on public land by public officials with public money,” such
as the slaughter of protected bison, two-ton mammals that
move “like fog” and that are brutalized by the National Park
Service, acting on behalf of corporate livestock interests.
Ketcham advocates for barring cattle from grazing on pub-
lic lands and ending the reign of conglomerates that use fed-
eral subsidies to undermine independent ranchers.
Glory and Its Litany of Horrors, by Fernanda Torres, trans-
lated from the Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker (Restless Books).
This clever novel probes the conflict between business and
artistry by chronicling the troubles of Mario Cardoso, a fa-
mous Brazilian actor past his prime. When a vanity pro-
duction of “King Lear” is derailed by Cardoso’s inability to
stop laughing mid-performance, he is forced to accept a se-
ries of humiliating jobs to stay afloat. As his professional
troubles mount, so, too, do his personal ones. Throughout,
Cardoso’s voice remains a blend of cynicism and delusion,
with the occasional insight: “What I lacked was the dig-
nity to wear a crown, none of us have it.”
The Tenth Muse, by Catherine Chung (Ecco). Two great enig-
mas form the center of this elegant novel, in which a bril-
liant mathematician attempts to solve the impenetrable Rie-
mann hypothesis and learn the truth of her family history.
Katherine is the daughter of an American G.I. and a Chi-
nese immigrant who disappears when Katherine is a girl.
During her childhood, in the nineteen-fifties, in Michigan,
her intelligence and mixed heritage alienate many people,
and lead her to wonder “in each situation whether this time
it was my femaleness or my Asianness or the combination
of both that branded me different.” When Katherine’s pre-
ternatural talent takes her to Germany, she begins to see the
outlines of how she might resolve the puzzles presented by
her life and her work. In the novel’s portrait of her persever-
ance, it pays moving homage to all the “unhailed, unnamed”
women in history whose talents were dismissed.
dream in which a mountainside breeze
carried to him the scents of butter, thyme,
and honey; and a literary sort of closure
is achieved.
For Hearn, however, the interactions
between the living and the dead were
determined not by some detached, met-
aphor-making sensibility but by the
unruly passions of the dead themselves.
They were driven back into contact
with the living by anger, by love, by the
desire for revenge. Their desires were
terrifying, all the more so because of
the difficulty of figuring out what drove
them and how they could be assuaged.
“
H
earn changed, as if magically,
from one person into another,
from a Greek islander into a British stu-
dent, from a penniless London street
ragamuffin into a respected American
newspaper writer, from a journalist into
a novelist, and, most astonishingly, from
a stateless Western man into a loyal Jap-
anese citizen,” Codrescu writes in his
introduction to the Princeton collection.
“His home was in language ... an in-
habitant, par excellence, of the Outside.”
The insistent tone of Codrescu’s ar-
gument testifies to the challenge, from
a twenty-first-century perspective, of
seeing Hearn and his work in that “out-
sider” light. From a purely literary per-
spective, he certainly stands apart. His
treatment of the folktale as literature—
innovative, even subversive at the time—
puts him in company with Yeats, Ste-
venson, Poe. Yet one can do only so much
connecting of Hearn to any other writer:
his literary path, as much as the life he
chose to live, was bizarrely sui generis.
His reputation among academics has
waxed and waned, but, his various teach-
ing posts at Japanese schools and uni-
versities notwithstanding, an academic
is the last thing Hearn ever was. “You
ask what is the use of drawing the Im-
possible?” he wrote. “I hold that the Im-
possible bears a much closer relation to
fact than does most of what we call the
real and the commonplace. The Im-
possible may not be naked truth; but I
think that it is usually truth—masked
and veiled, perhaps, but eternal. Now
to me this Japanese dream is true,—
true, at least, as human love is. Consid-
ered even as a ghost it is true. Who-
ever pretends not to believe in ghosts
of any sort, lies to his own heart.”
