Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

The Vanishing Family, by Robert Kolker (Doubleday). Unlike Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia often begins in midlife. In this searching and suspenseful chronicle, nine adult siblings reckon with the disease’s imprint on their family—their mother began to show signs of illness in her late forties—and with the question of whether to find out, through genetic testing, if they are carriers. Kolker’s granular portrait is interwoven with enlightening snippets of scientific history, but the book’s most powerful strand is about two sisters, one of whom, Sue, begins caring for the other, Christy, in her early thirties, and does so for decades. By the end, Kolker writes, their lives were “completely enmeshed, like one life lived for each other.”

The Jews of Italy, by Anna Foa, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti (Princeton). This panoramic account, spanning two millennia, argues that, without Jews, Italy would not be Italy. Although Italian Jews shared many experiences with Jewish communities elsewhere in Europe, Foa shows, the Catholic Church’s outsized role in the region distinguished their history: papal doctrine protected Jews’ presence while consigning them to a subordinate position, and the same institution that prevented generalized expulsion also established ghettos. Foa examines the effects of this dual standing, from Christians’ enthusiasm for Kabbalah during the Renaissance and the vital part of Jews in the Risorgimento to the passing of racial laws under Fascism.

Illustration by Henri Campeã

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I Made You Up Inside My Head, by Marta Pérez-Carbonell, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey (Riverhead). “All the versions of a story coexist, like the colors on a Rubik’s cube,” proposes Alicia, the narrator of this début novel. “And it is hard to get them all to align.” One night, on a sleeper train from London to Edinburgh, Alicia listens to a stranger relate his side of a divisive incident in which he used the life of a friend as fodder for a best-selling novel. Alicia, in turn, decides to share a dark piece of her own past for the first time. “Confessions, outbursts, and revelations” abound as this whimsical narrative contemplates what it means to bear witness to another person, and how doing so can alter us permanently.

Days & Chances, by Joanna Klink (Penguin). The carefully crafted poems in this collection explore the porousness of the boundary between inner life and external phenomena, articulating how an individual can seem grounded in space and time as a discrete being yet also be at one with the world. “Some days I am so filled with myself / I can see nothing,” one poem begins, but “Some days I’m nothing more than hearsay, / a story read back to me that makes no sense,” another muses. Klink is attuned to the ways that both nature and social environments can be suffused with memory, longing, and foreboding. Her curiosity and tenderness toward other entities, whether human, animal, or plant, is sharpened by a feeling of terminal separateness from them.

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