magiadoreal

By  TERRENCE RAFFERTY There’s a whiff of madness in the fiction of Clarice Lispector. The “Complete Stories” of the great Brazilian writer, edited by Benjamin Moser and sensitively translated by Katrina Dodson, is a dangerous book to read quickly or casually because it’s so consistently delirious. Sentence by sentence, page by page, Lispector is exhilaratingly, arrestingly strange, but her perceptions come so fast, veer so wildly between the mundane and the metaphysical, that after a while you don’t know where you are, either in the book or in the world. “Coherence, I don’t want it anymore,” a character in one of her stories thinks. “Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder.” That character, a 37-year-old woman in melancholy flight from her husband or lover, has this revelation too: “It was a lie to say you could only have one thought at a time: She had many thoughts that intersected and were multiple.” Especially in the 1970s, in the last decade of Lispector’s life, when that sto

By  ANDREA WULF Usually when reviewing a novel, you must be careful not to give away too much plot. But in the case of Victoria Shorr’s “Backlands,” there’s no such danger: Shorr herself reveals the bare bones of the story in the first few pages. Put simply, “Backlands” is the fictionalized account of a real-life one-eyed bandit called Lampião and his lover, Maria Bonita — famous Brazilian outlaws who took from the rich and gave to the poor. From the early 1920s to his capture in 1938, Lampião and his gang controlled much of the Sertão, a huge and dusty swath of land in the northeast of the country, “almost the size of Spain.” More than once, they were cornered but managed to escape. For a long time, Lampião seemed invincible and his life, as Shorr puts it, “was a tango, full of beauty and danger, mixed.” The novel’s heroine, Maria Bonita, grows up hearing the tales and singing the folk songs about this legendary bandit and his companions. Married off to the local shoemaker when s

By Kate Bolick Today 19 percent of American women reach their mid-40s without ever having a child — a figure that has nearly doubled in four decades, a truly staggering statistic. The sheer velocity of its emergence suggests a unity of intent, as if an army of Gen Xers came of age razing day care centers and burning diapers, and continues to march steadily into the future, attracting new recruits by the minute. I suspect even these ostensible trailblazers wish it were that straightforward. A 2012 Centers for Disease Control report shows that among women in the 40-44 age bracket — the final reckoning, according to such surveys — 22 percent were “childless by choice,” compared with 35 percent who felt they didn’t have any say in the matter. Far from being a unified front, this growing demographic tilts toward women who had a wish about how their lives would turn out that didn’t come true. The mystery of whether this wish is a personal urge, a biological imperative or the uncon

For two years running, Oxfam International has traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to make a request: Could the superrich kindly cease devouring the world’s wealth? And while they’re at it, could they quit using “their financial might to influence public policies that favor the rich at the expense of everyone else”? In 2014, when Oxfam arrived in Davos, it came bearing the (then) shocking news that just 85 individuals controlled as much wealth as half of the world’s population combined. This January, that number went down to 80 individuals. Dropping this news in Davos is a great publicity stunt, but as a political strategy, it’s somewhat baffling. Why would the victors of a class war choose to surrender simply because the news is out that they have well and truly won? Oxfam’s answer is that the rich must battle inequality or they will find themselves in a stagnant economy with no one to buy their products. (Davos thought bubble: “Isn’t that what cheap c

By  DAMON LINKER Ask a devout, theologically literate ­Roman Catholic to describe the institution of the church, and you’re likely to be told that it was founded by Jesus Christ at the moment he gave his disciple ­Peter the “keys to the kingdom of heaven” and vowed that “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.” This made ­Peter the head of the universal church, ­empowered to administer the sacraments, spread the Gospel, save souls and forgive sins until Christ’s return, as well as to pronounce with infallible authority on ­matters of Christian faith and morals. Christ also promised Peter that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against the church — meaning that no matter how corrupt the institution might appear at any given moment of history, it will never be so consumed by evil that it ceases to be capable of fulfilling its God-appointed tasks. Ask an informed historian or journalist about the history of the church — especially the Vatican and the papacy — and y

By  TOM SEGEV On July 22, 1946, seven milk churns containing concealed bombs exploded in the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Six floors of British government and military offices collapsed, and 92 people were killed, most of them Arab, British and Jewish civilians. What was at the time the most lethal terrorist attack in history was perpetrated by the Irgun Zvai Leumi (Hebrew for National Military Organization) headed by Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel. The organization’s main aim was to force the British out of Palestine, which they had ruled since 1917. Bruce Hoffman, the director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, uses the story of the Irgun as a test case. At a time when terrorism seems to have an increasing and devastating effect on the course of history, Hoffman’s opening question is riveting: “Does terrorism work?” His answer i

W. H. Auden said that a great book reads  you . Eileen Simpson’s beautiful, recently reissued memoir of her doomed marriage to the poet John Berryman, “Poets in Their Youth” (1982), read me twice, just a few weeks ago and about 30 or so years before that, when I was in my early 20s. I might well have been two different people. Back when I was green and carefree — to borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas, who makes several appearances in the book — I was in awe of Simpson’s poets. Berryman numbered among his most intimate friends Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. I was convinced these figures were heroes of modern life. “What the hell is happiness?” Simpson quotes Berryman saying to her “with a happy laugh” when they had been married just a short time. Then, she writes, he asks “more uneasily, ‘Should a poet seek it?’” I thought that was a question worth pondering. I grew older, bade farewell to the romantic notion of the accursed genius at war with society, and