THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021 61
BRIEFLY NOTED
Speak, Silence, by Carole Angier (Bloomsbury). This biography
of W. G. Sebald, who died twenty years ago, at the age of
fifty-seven, examines him using his own methods, with pa-
tient excavation of unspoken traumas in his life and the lives
of those around him. Angier, who has written biographies of
Jean Rhys and Primo Levi, recounts Sebald’s insulated child-
hood in the Bavarian Alps, his growing awareness of German
atrocities, his academic career in England, and his sudden suc-
cess in middle age. In delicate readings of his work, she iden-
tifies sources—landlords, family members, schoolteachers, fel-
low writers and artists—and demonstrates how his writing
stemmed from an ineluctable empathy with misfortune and
from a persistent, unceasing exploration of historical mem-
ory and its limits.
The Gold Machine, by Iain Sinclair (Oneworld). In 2019, Sin-
clair travelled with his daughter to northern Peru, to retrace
the footsteps of his great-grandfather Arthur. Arthur—sent
there in 1891 by the Peruvian Corporation of London, to sur-
vey land for coffee colonies—wrote a book about his adven-
tures, an assured Victorian narrative that belied the horrors of
colonialism. Those horrors are front and center in Sinclair’s
account, a nightmarish reckoning that invokes “Fitzcarraldo”
and “Heart of Darkness.” Impeccably researched, the text nev-
ertheless feels unreal, moving uneasily between past and pres-
ent and drawing parallels between colonialism and tourism.
The Sinclairs find themselves—like the indigenous Asháninka,
whose ancestors were forced to labor in the colonies—“wan-
dering at a loss through this desert of discredited dreams.”
A Single Rose, by Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by
Alison Anderson (Europa). Early in this Zen-inspired novel,
Rose, a botanist living in Paris, is summoned to Kyoto for the
reading of her father’s will. Rose never met her father, a Jap-
anese art dealer, but he turns out to have hired photographers
to secretly document her life for him. Now, at his behest, his
assistant guides Rose on a tour of gardens, temples, and restau-
rants designed to reveal the heart of Japan. At Buddhist sites,
she is engulfed with a “tide of sadness mingled with flashes of
pure happiness,” and extolls the perfection of the “stillness of
motion of the absolute present.” The story is interspersed with
aphoristic Japanese tales from various periods, as melancholy
is gradually transmuted into joy.
Hard Like Water, by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by
Carlos Rojas (Grove). Gao Aijun, the narrator of this boister-
ous novel, set during the Cultural Revolution, finds his life
charmless: his village is like “a pool of stagnant water,” and his
wife makes him feel “a clump of cotton” in his throat. Then he
meets a beautiful woman, also married, and, to attract her, sets
out to lead the “revolution” in their village. In speech larded
with Mao quotes and traditional maxims, Gao reveals how their
romance, fuelled by the feverish political climate, pitches the
village into ever-escalating extremism—a years-long parade of
self-advancing schemes culminating in an unthinkable end.
win’s characters are jealous and con-
fused, when it comes to food they are
stubborn and rhapsodic. Desire leaves
these women constantly hungry; with
a good meal, at least, they can be briefly
sated. In Colwin’s story “French Movie,”
from a 1986 collection, Billy, a graduate
student hopelessly in love with a mar-
ried man, takes small comfort in the
Chinese restaurant where each step of
their romance (and, eventually, its de-
mise) is marked by “the same meal: flat
noodles with meat sauce, steamed broc-
coli, and fried fish.” In “Family Happi-
ness,” from 1982, which follows Polly
Solo Miller Demarest, an Upper East
Side denizen in the throes of an affair
with a louche painter, Colwin notes that
juice in the Demarest household is al-
ways made fresh, because Polly’s father
had believed that “liquid must never
come into contact with paraffin, as in
waxed cartons. The whole family backed
him on this point, and everyone was
happy to take turns squeezing oranges
and grapefruits in the old-fashioned
squeezer.” These rituals are grounding
but f leeting, as food always is: meals
come to an end; vegetables wither and
wilt in the fridge.
I
s there any enduring consolation?
What people really want in life, Col-
win writes in “Home Cooking,” is “an
enormous return on a small investment.
Almost the only situation in which this
is possible is cooking.” In the kitchen,
she discovered—and hoped her read-
ers would, too—that recipes didn’t sim-
ply have to be followed; they could be
invented. If romantic experiments could
provide eventual insight, culinary ones
yielded instant results. Effort didn’t
guarantee success—the soufflé might
collapse, the hollandaise might never
emulsify—but through the vibrancy
and the personality of her food writ-
ing Colwin showed that, in some sense,
the work did always pay off. This kind
of knowledge led her to a distinctively
sure-footed approach, one she wanted
to share with others. A beginner in the
kitchen, Colwin writes, should “call up
the best cook he or she knows and lis-
ten to what that person says. And then
the novice should stick to it.”
Colwin is regularly compared to her
contemporary Nora Ephron. They were
both brunette Manhattanites with a
