Briefly Noted Book Reviews – The New Yorker

Continuous Creation, by Les Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This final collection by the great Australian poet, who died in 2019, encompasses archness, reserve, lament, and tenderness. Murrays reflections on political and social subjects, including Brexit, bushfires, and his countrys neglect of literature, swing from the charmingly reserved to the jarringly detached. His nature poetry is more charged: there are poems about pippies, green catbirds, Australian pelicans, and a weebill caught in the grille of Murrays car. The earths physical landscapeespecially that of rural Australia, one of Murrays lifelong preoccupationsis rendered with extraordinary, often strange, beauty. Swallows in flight are whipping over glass; a willow tree is jammed/with soft white pearl-shell//a cascade of faces/down tiers and staircases/becoming a shatter.

A Sisters Story, by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa). The sisters from the authors previous novel, A Girl Returneda stoic narrator and her fiery younger sister, Adrianareappear in this unsettling companion tale. The narrator, now a professor in France, returns to her home town, on the coast of Abruzzo, after Adriana has a mysterious accident. Her renewed immersion in the towns social rhythms, particularly in the gritty fishermens quarter, brings back powerful memoriesof the end of her marriageto a gentle yet duplicitous husband, of Adrianas harried arrival at her house with a baby. I felt intensely the unease of being her sister, the narrator says of Adriana, as she moves fluidly between the past and the present, sifting years of unarticulated emotions.

The Last Days of Roger Federer, by Geoff Dyer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The twilight of careers underpins these kaleidoscopic musings on artistic and sporting endeavors. Dyer considers the late phase of Bob Dylan, the mythology surrounding Nietzsches decline and death, and the drive of talented people to keep going. Andy Murray, hobbled by injury, persisted in coming back for more even if more meant less and less; Willem de Kooning, blind and suffering from dementia, made paintings in which the obstacle became the path. An irony of endings, Dyer writes, is that lastness is oddly self-perpetuating. For a while at least, one last thing generates and leads to another.

Life on the Rocks, by Juli Berwald (Riverhead). This book on the plight of coral reefs spikes the normally glum discourse about ocean conservation with a measure of capitalist techno-optimism, arguing that a combination of marine science and smart business could yet bring salvation. The heroes here are various public-private partnerships: commercial coral farms in Bali; a reef-restoration project in Sulawesi; debt swaps and blue bonds for ocean protection in Seychelles; even a geo-engineered cloud brightening plan for the Great Barrier Reef. Berwald interweaves the insights of conservationists and entrepreneurs with a parallel narrative of her daughters struggles with O.C.D., suggesting that complex problems call for radical solutions.

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Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker