Wednesday Links
A new adaptation of “Master and Margarita,” a history of the Mafia, Garnett drops the AP, ancient Greeks in Rome, and more.
Good morning! Cameron Manley reports on Michael Lockshin’s new adaption of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita: “Despite surging to the top of Russia’s domestic box office just days after its release in January, it has raised the ire of pro-Kremlin bloggers who resent the director’s stance against the country’s war in Ukraine, as well as the story’s core message.” Is it any good? Hard to say based on this remark: “Lockshin’s Russo-American background, however, has led him to approach the book from a unique angle. Unlike other Russian directors, who have feared taking too many liberties when adapting the novel for the silver screen, Lockshin demonstrates remarkable creativity. He successfully combines a deep understanding of the original text and author with Hollywood-style storytelling techniques, and condenses the immensity of the novel into a succinct and compelling narrative that also remains faithful to the original’s key themes.”
Garnett, the publisher of USA Today, to stop using Associated Press articles and other materials: “Gannett will eliminate AP dispatches, photos and video as of March 25, according to an internal memo from chief content officer Kristin Roberts, obtained by TheWrap. ‘We create more journalism every day than the AP,’ Roberts said in the Tuesday statement, adding that not paying for AP content ‘will give us the opportunity to redeploy more dollars toward our teams and build capacity where we might have gaps.’”
Dominic Green reviews the first volume of Louis Ferrante’s history of the Mafia: “The pacey, detailed, and gripping Rise of Empire is the opening volume in Louis Ferrante's Borgata Trilogy. This epic structure resembles that of the Godfather movies. More relevantly, it resembles John Julius Norwich's trilogy on the Byzantine Empire: the beginnings in a collapsed Italian society; the golden age as an Italian system blooms in a new world; the pitiful decline, in this case under pressure from the barbarians at the FBI and the RICO Act. The resemblance is not accidental. The story of the Cosa Nostra is an imperial epic in exile and a shadowy synecdoche for that greater epic, the American century.”
Greeks in Rome: “Charles Freeman’s latest book, Children of Athena, is a highly readable tour through the lives and accomplishments of some of the great exponents of Greek culture under Rome. He introduces readers to a bracingly varied and energetic cast of characters — the geographers, doctors, polymaths, botanists, satirists, and orators are just part of the repertoire. In an early chapter, we meet the brilliant Greek historian Polybius, who wrote in the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, while training his sights on the rise of Rome in his own time.”
Luke Harding reviews the first book of a new crime series by Andrey Kurkov:
Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Silver Bone, begins in dramatic fashion. Its hero, Samson Kolechko, is walking in the streets of revolutionary Kyiv. It is the spring of 1919. Suddenly, two Russian Cossacks appear. They chop off his ear with a sabre before riding off. “Hot blood poured down his cheek and seeped under his collar,” Kurkov writes. Samson’s unfortunate father is cut down and killed.
The severed right ear – recovered and placed in a tin – plays a central role in Kurkov’s surreal and wildly enjoyable story. Although no longer attached to its owner’s head, it hears things. Samson can listen remotely to the conversations of two Red Army soldiers who billet in his home. He is an electrical engineering student, but becomes a detective. The ear is an ingenious investigative tool he can use to solve riddles and shaggy plots.
Chilton Williamson, Jr. reviews Claes Ryn’s The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken: “Ryn holds that conservative intellectuals who proposed to reclaim the American party system from the liberals—the Democrats and the left generally—while, in twenty-first-century lingo, ‘taking back the culture,’ lacked the historical and human imagination to see how the job could be accomplished given the social and intellectual context of the times. To have succeeded, he argues, they would have needed to have had a far wider knowledge of, and a firmer grasp on, the principles of Western philosophy and a greater familiarity with serious culture—literature, music, the plastic and fine arts—in which they had little to no interest, but rather a mild disdain for them.”
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