{"id":155774,"date":"2021-11-12T11:07:09","date_gmt":"2021-11-12T16:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=155774"},"modified":"2022-03-21T11:51:14","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T15:51:14","slug":"the-reviews-review-nocturne-vibes-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/11\/12\/the-reviews-review-nocturne-vibes-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Moral Suasion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

I am not sure I will ever <\/span>agree<\/span>\u00a0with the viability of the political trajectory traced in Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s <\/span>The Ministry for the Future<\/span><\/i><\/a>; I don\u2019t think we are going to survive by successfully convincing an administrative class\u2014through science or terror or moral suasion\u2014to administer the world better until climate collapse is averted. But so what? You don\u2019t read books because they say what you already believe. You read books because they take the problem seriously, take the world seriously, don\u2019t counterfeit the dimensions of the predicament. Or, those are at least some reasons to read books, and The Ministry for the Future<\/em> is one of very few that satisfy those imperatives for me. Interestingly, his books, including this one, are often classified as \u201cHard SF,\u201d meaning they are based in careful and arguably wonky extensions of hard science. Yes and no. Certainly they take science very seriously, and Robinson is wildly erudite and engaged in such matters. But Robinson\u2019s books have over the last decade increasingly understood that the underlying problem is not science, and therefore has no scientific solution; it lies in political economy, and a sustained change that might preserve the possibility of human flourishing has to happen there. I think that should complicate the categories a little. In any regard, the book is real thinking and real invention, operating at the scale of the whole, which is really the place to be these days.\u00a0<\/span>\u2014Joshua Clover\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Listening: <\/strong>Dean & Britta\u2019s beautiful pandemic livestreams<\/span><\/a> were a light during the darkest days of the pandemic, but as I discovered this weekend, their <\/span>Quarantine Tapes<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u2014culled from those at-home performances\u2014are the perfect thing to play at a dinner party. (Also loving: Dean Wareham\u2019s new solo album, <\/span>I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of LA<\/span><\/i><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Reading: <\/strong>Esquire<\/span><\/i> Classic <\/span><\/i>is a relatively inexpensive (four bucks a month) web subscription that opens a world of amazing reporting:<\/span> Joy Williams<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> Lynn Darling<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> Gay Talese<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> Tom Morgan<\/span><\/a>. Lots of new (old) work by writers I love and tons by writers I had never heard of. (Cue: interesting questions about the ephemeral nature of magazine writing.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Seeing: <\/strong>Jazz pianist Jason Moran\u2019s weeklong residency at the newly reopened<\/span> Village Vanguard<\/span><\/a>\u2014an annual tradition\u2014and<\/span> Gnit<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span>which is playwright Will Eno\u2019s reworking of Henrik Ibsen\u2019s <\/span>Peer<\/span><\/i> Gynt<\/span><\/i>: \u201c<\/span>part horror story, part fairy tale, and part road movie.\u201d And<\/span> Terraza 7<\/span><\/a>, in Jackson Heights, is not great at updating its events calendar, but it\u2019s still the best club that I\u2019ve been to since getting my J&J jab.\u00a0<\/span>\u2014Alex Abramovich<\/b><\/p>\n

How well do we really know our partners? And\u2014comparatively\u2014how well do we really know ourselves? These are the questions at the heart of Domenico Starnone\u2019s 2019 novel <\/span>Trust<\/span><\/i><\/a>, newly translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri and published earlier this week by Europa. In three sections, each told from a different perspective, Starnone examines the messy, overlapping lives of Pietro, a teacher turned celebrated writer, his ex-lover, and his wife. Before their break-up, Pietro confessed a secret to Teresa, and it is this secret, shaped as it is by a certain carelessness on the part of Pietro, that will haunt these characters for decades. <\/span>\u2014Rhian Sasseen<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read Abramovich and Clover in conversation about rock \u2019n\u2019 roll freedom, American capitalism, automobiles, and Jonathan Richman versus the Velvet Underground here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We review materialist fiction, quarantine tapes, and a love-triangle novel. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMoral Suasion by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 12, 2021 \u2013 We review materialist fiction, quarantine tapes, and a love-triangle novel.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/11\/12\/the-reviews-review-nocturne-vibes-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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