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Today in The New York Review of Books: Caroline Fraser wades through the world’s trash; David A. Bell charts the evolution of Notre-Dame; Tim Parks reads Domenico Starnone’s latest novel; a poem by Andrea Cohen; and, from the archives, Matthew Aucoin on Kaija Saariaho’s final opera.
Caroline Fraser
The Throwaway Planet
Three books raise political and moral questions about human consumption—and the value we place on those who clean up the waste.
David A. Bell
‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’
In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.
Tim Parks
A Devotee of Deception
In Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea, an elderly writer looks back across a life in which he has always sought distance and control rather than passion.
Lot’s Wife
Free from the Archives
Tomorrow evening, the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, Innocence, will be making its America premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. In the Review’s May 23, 2024, issue, Matthew Aucoin wrote about Innocence—“a fierce, pitiless excavation of the festering aftermath of a school shooting”—as well as Saariaho’s career, which began when she was almost fifty years old with the premiere of L’Amour de loin, “a transcendent masterpiece of seemingly limitless beauty and depth.”
Matthew Aucoin
Perpetual Expectation
It’s illuminating to listen to Saariaho’s first opera alongside her last one: her winding evolution through the intervening two decades can tell us a lot about what is gained and what is lost when a composer trades a dramaturgy founded on the patient, organic development of musical materials—as in L’Amour de loin—for the hard-boiled, somewhat more conventionally “theatrical” dramaturgy of Innocence.
Private Life: A New York Review Podcast
Mark Polizzotti joins host Jarrett Earnest to discuss André Breton, translation, and surrealism. Listen and subscribe at the link below.
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