THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021 75
beauty, but she was practical enough to
know its precise value, and to antici-
pate the cost of its fading. And, though
she seems to have enjoyed acting, she
was never satisfied with the results. “Oh,
if once, if only once I could see a pre-
view and come home feeling satisfied,”
she remarked after one film screening.
Garbo was no Norma Desmond, view-
ing her old films over and over to ad-
mire her own image. Screening some
of them years later, at MOMA, Barry
Paris reported, she got a kick out of im-
itating herself: “R-r-rodney, when will
this painful love of ours ever die?” She
once told the actor David Niven that
she’d quit because she had “made enough
faces.” The analysis was typical of her—
unreflective, cryptic, deprecatory.
She was, Tennessee Williams thought,
“the saddest of creatures—an artist who
abandons her art.” Yet Garbo doesn’t
seem to have seen herself that way. Per-
haps attuned to the perils of growing
old in Hollywood, she moved to New
York, to an apartment on the East Side,
spent long stretches of time in Europe
with friends who were wealthy or witty
or both, went to the theatre, collected
a bit of art. She did not reinvent her-
self as a memoirist or a philanthropist
(though her estate was valued at roughly
fifty million dollars when she died, in
1990) or an ambassador of any sort of
good will. People loved the mystery of
it all; photographers were always chas-
ing after her. But she wasn’t in hiding;
she got out. One wag called her a “her-
mit about town.”
Did Garbo have a rich inner life to
sustain her for all those years? There
isn’t much evidence of it. She was not
a remarkable or notably confiding let-
ter writer, journal keeper, or conversa-
tionalist; she does not seem to have had
a surfeit of intellectual curiosity. In the
movies, she had always been able to con-
vey a sense of hidden depths, of mem-
ories and emotions lighting room after
interior room, never quite surfacing to
be articulated. Were those feelings com-
plex, interesting? We were persuaded
they must be. The relationship to fame
that she enacted in the last decades of
her life was something similar: it looked
profound, perhaps even spiritual—a re-
nunciation of celebrity’s blessings as well
as its scourges. But who knows? Maybe
she was just tired of making faces.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Under Jerusalem, by Andrew Lawler (Doubleday). Chroni-
cling more than a century and a half of contentious digs around
Jerusalem’s sacred sites, this history profiles the various “trea-
sure hunters, scholarly clerics, religious extremists, and secu-
lar archaeologists” who hoped to uncover the Biblical city. Law-
ler’s history tracks both the marvels found underground and
the events unfolding above them, including the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire, the birth of Zionism, the creation of the
Israeli state, and the shattered peace talks of the nineties. Prob-
ing excavators’ often partisan motivations, Lawler highlights
archeology’s power to shape narratives and its development
from a discipline “not far removed from its far older cousin,
tomb robbing,” into a modern tool of nationalist mythmaking.The Amur River, by Colin Thubron (Harper). The world’s
tenth-longest river, running through eastern Russia and north-
eastern China, is unlike such peers as the Mississippi and the
Nile, according to this account by a veteran travel writer.
Rather than fostering cohesion, the Amur is a source of di-
vision, with anxiety and distrust seething on both banks, de-
spite centuries of trade and migration. Thubron travels by
horse, boat, and bus, across steppe, wetland, and forest, and
encounters Mongols, Russians, Cossacks, and Chinese. Cit-
izens of former Soviet republics complain of economic blight
and lost traditions and Thubron weaves in historical anec-
dotes, such as the freedom Chekhov felt while sailing down
the river to interview convicts in Sakhalin, and his stopover
with a Japanese prostitute in Blagoveschensk.The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak (Bloomsbury). The
focal point of this novel set in Cyprus is a sentient fig tree,
capable not only of “volition, altruism and kinship” but also
of storytelling. In 1974, the tree becomes a secret meeting place
for Defne, a Turkish Muslim, and Kostas, a Greek Christian.
The lovers’ story, partly narrated by the tree, illuminates the
island’s violent history, colonial legacy, and ecological chal-
lenges. More than forty years later, one of the lovers has died
and the tree—thanks to a cutting that was smuggled off the
island while Defne was pregnant with Kostas’s daughter—is
in England. “When you save a fig tree from a storm,” the tree
explains, “it is someone’s memory you are saving.”Yellow Rain, by Mai Der Vang (Graywolf ). This poetry col-
lection revolves around disturbing events toward the end of
the Vietnam War: thousands of Hmong refugees died, and
many others experienced violent illness, after exposure to a
sticky, powdery substance that witnesses saw fall from planes.
The U.S. accused the Soviet Union of deploying chemical
weapons, which the latter denied; later, American scientists
claimed that the poisonous “yellow rain” was honeybee feces.
Part documentary, part puzzle, the book incorporates text
from declassified documents. Vang’s lyrical interventions
strike powerful notes of lamentation and rage, yet most ef-
fective are her visual collage-poems, which use fragmenta-
tion to interrogate the inhumanity of the official account.