THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 73
BRIEFLY NOTED
Hymns of the Republic, by S. C. Gwynne (Scribner). In Au-
gust, 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant, reflecting on threats to
the Union cause, wrote that the Confederacy’s “only hope
now is a divided North.” He was right to be worried. As this
taut, propulsive history of the war’s final year demonstrates,
the infighting that was roiling Northern politics nearly changed
the course of history. President Lincoln, seeking reëlection,
faced exhausted voters, strident opposition, assaults from
within his own party over the Emancipation Proclamation,
and even calls for unconditional peace. His allies considered
electoral victory “an impossibility,” but knew that any other
result would imperil the war effort—a reminder that a deeply
divided America is one decidedly up for grabs.Virginia Woolf, by Gillian Gill (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
In this vibrant biography, Woolf emerges not only as a for-
midable writer and feminist but as a reluctant player in a
long-running family soap opera, replete with dysfunctional
Victorian patriarchs, martyred mothers, insanity, and a great
many extramarital affairs. Gill traces the writer’s psycholog-
ical development via her connections with others, making
use of her voluminous correspondence. The wild doings of
the Bloomsbury group are told with gossipy verve, but more
revealing are accounts of the “fiercely loving and protective”
bonds Woolf shared with the women in her family. Pointing
to a generations-old “pattern of female relations” that encour-
aged creativity and empowerment, Gill shows how Woolf
wrote her foremothers’ legacy into her work, bequeathing it
“to the children and grandchildren of her mind.”Divide Me by Zero, by Lara Vapnyar (Tin House). Katya, the
narrator of this elegiac yet funny novel, traces the defining
moments of her life—from Soviet Russia to Staten Island,
and from unhappy marriage to unhappy engagement and un-
happy affair. The novel is framed by the death of her strict
mother, a mathematician whose scribbled notecards, for a
math-inspired self-help book she was writing, serve as enig-
matic signposts. As Katya strives to find herself as a writer
and an independent woman, the complex logic of her moth-
er’s maxims seems to cloud everything, even love: “One way
to describe love according to the gospel of math is as a con-
dition that causes a dimensional shift.”Stories of the Sahara, by Sanmao, translated from the Chinese by
Mike Fu (Bloomsbury). Available in English for the first time,
these semiautobiographical stories by a cherished Taiwanese
writer depict the life of El Aaiún, a small town in Spanish-con-
trolled Western Sahara, where she moved in 1973, after being
captivated by a feature in National Geographic. Headstrong but
compassionate, Sanmao made friends with local Sahrawis and
Spanish bureaucrats, absorbing and questioning everything
around her. The stories weave the quotidian and the historical
into a single narrative: the wedding of a child bride; legends of
evil spirits, heard while camping at night; rising hostility to
both Spanish rule and the looming influence of Morocco.between profound and superficial min-
imalism may be a matter of conceptual
inversion: the question is whether you
accept diminishment in order to more
efficiently assert your will or whether
you assert your will in order to accept
the unseen bounty of self-diminishment.
This is also where the minimalism of
ideas meets the minimalism of things—
the latter argues that ridding yourself
of possessions means ridding yourself
of trouble and difficulty; the former sug-
gests that the end point of stripping
away excess is the realization that the
world is more troubled, more difficult,
more discomfiting, and also more won-
drous and full of possibility than it seems.
The term that Elgin and Mitchell
used in 1977, “voluntary simplicity,” was
borrowed from Richard Gregg, a law-
yer from Colorado who, after the First
World War, gave up the law and took a
job with a railway workers’ union. In the
early twenties, hundreds of thousands
of railway workers went on strike, and
more than a dozen people died in clashes
between strikers and armed guards.
Gregg, devastated, came across a book
of Gandhi’s writings in a Chicago book-
store, and travelled to India to meet
Gandhi and learn about peaceful resis-
tance. In 1934, he published “The Power
of Nonviolence,” which Martin Luther
King, Jr., later described as one of the
books that had had the greatest influence
on him. Gregg published “The Value of
Voluntary Simplicity” in 1936. In it, he
calls capitalism a “gravely defective” sys-
tem that ought to be “reformed or ended.”
Several years ago, Duane Elgin, who
has become an author and an activist fo-
cussed on sustainability, published a paper
arguing that either we can “continue
along our current path of denial and bar-
gaining” until we drain our natural re-
sources and our capacity to relate to one
another as humans or we can “awaken
ourselves from the dream of limitless
material growth and actively invent new
ways to live within the material limits of
the Earth.” This is, in the end, the most
convincing argument for minimalism:
with less noise in our heads, we might
hear the emergency sirens more clearly.
If we put down some baggage, we might
move more swiftly. We might address
the frantic, frightening, intensifying con-
ditions that have prompted us to think
of minimalism as an attractive escape.