Culture

Book Review: ‘The Hill,’ by Harriet Clark

Published

3 hours ago

May 5, 2026

Book Review: ‘The Hill,’ by Harriet Clark

Part of Clark’s subtlety is the way in which the category of “what Suzanna refuses to know” remains undefined. Is it, as her grandmother would have it, full comprehension of her mother’s crime? Is it the realm of cold hard facts in general? Or is it nothing less than her own personhood, what with Suzanna’s self-curtailing commitment to remaining within visiting distance of the hill? Whatever the case, Suzanna’s mode of consciousness seems to grant her less quantifiable, more precious forms of knowledge. Even into her teenage years there’s a visionary quality to the way she experiences the world — as if she were a tiny, strange saint of a religion of her own devising.

All this numinousness isn’t to say that Clark can’t also be very droll. Consider, for example, the flock of captious old Commie dowagers who surround the grandmother and on whom Suzanna waits, obediently dispensing gin. These ostensible friends like to ask one another things like, “Remember, Sylvie, when you were a Nazi?”

Clark’s gifts for both the comic and the visionary reach their peak in a virtuoso, semi-hallucinatory passage toward the end of the novel. Facing death, the grandmother enlists Suzanna’s help in burning her personal effects. Even her wig is destined for the pyre — a wastebasket on the terrace. As Suzanna dutifully tosses it into the flames, an unholy vision presents itself: “The wig rose right out of the basket of its own accord, never seeming more like human hair than it did in that instant, hovering before us, burning, presenting itself, then sweeping over the railing, caught on its own fierce wind.”

Soon, with the wig transfigured into a kind of premature ghost of its owner, “my grandmother is looking at me and she is telling me everything: about her mother, her mother’s hair. …” The pages that follow, conjuring the affective lives of generations of women, are both dreamlike and the most exhilaratingly all-seeing of the book. In this sense, Suzanna is wide awake.

THE HILL | By Harriet Clark | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 276 pp. | $27

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Culture

Book Review: ‘Ghost Stories,’ by Siri Hustvedt

Published

15 hours ago

May 5, 2026

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Book Review: ‘Ghost Stories,’ by Siri Hustvedt

She was blond and he was dark-haired; they were almost photonegatives. She looked as if she’d been in Bergman films. He was, visually, America’s Camus — wary, heavy-lidded, wreathed in cigarillo smoke, an intellectual turned out in black Levi’s and sheepskin-lined leather jackets.

Hustvedt and Auster’s double-barreled impact could prompt strange reactions. Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul’s lifted a glass and said, “To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Hustvedt wasn’t surprised when he slowly faded from their lives.

Auster was diagnosed with cancer in January 2023, when he was 75. Hustvedt tells the story of his illness — the chaotic E.R. visits, the hair loss, the shrinking and then metastasizing of his tumor, the wracking immunotherapy, the wheelchairs, the inability to write and the gradual loss of language — largely by reprinting the matter-of-fact group emails she sent to close friends to keep them apprised of his progress.

These sorts of missives, as anyone who has written or received them knows, are an art form of their own. When delivering good news, Hustvedt urged caution. “There is an important difference between optimism and hope,” she wrote in one such email. “The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that, at least for those who love the patient, are unsustainable. Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”

Auster was stoic about his illness, but restless and held captive in the borderless region he termed “Cancerland.” No longer able to write fiction, near his death he began to compose a series of letters to his grandson. These letters, which are largely about family history, are printed here and are models of that form: warm, direct, undogmatic.

Culture

Can You Match Up These Novels With the Writers Who Died Before They Could Finish Them?

Published

1 day ago

May 4, 2026

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Can You Match Up These Novels With the Writers Who Died Before They Could Finish Them?

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.

Culture

Book Review: ‘Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,’ by Yevgenia Nayberg

Published

4 days ago

May 1, 2026

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CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg

“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”

The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.

It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.

Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.

When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)

In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.

The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.

Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.

On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.

On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”

In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.

As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.

In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.

Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.

Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.

Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.

“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.