3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Place

This is the sixth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of place.

How do writers convey sense of place? Barry Lopez, in his essay “The American Geography” (included in his 1998 collection About This Life), provided this recipe: “It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind.” All three writers in this series are brilliant observers and describers of place. 

For example, in The Old Ways, Macfarlane evokes Waking Stairs, where he begins his walk on the great British offshore path called the Broomway, as follows:

The air at Waking Stairs was warm and close; thick like gel in the nose and mouth. The tide had recently turned, and just offshore the exposed Black Grounds were steaming: a brown mudscape of canyons and buttresses, turgid and gleaming, through which streams of riddled. Sandpipers and oystercatchers strutted in search of breakfast. The surface of my body felt porous, absorbent. The creeks and channels bubbled and glistened. Two big gulls pottered the tideline, monitoring us with lackadaisical, violent eyes.

Macfarlane’s descriptions of place are vivid, sensuous. His words call up pictures. Look at the way he evokes Stornoway harbour, where he launches his voyage to the Shiants:

Mid-morning departure, Stornoway Harbour, which is also known as the Hoil: hints of oil, hints of hooley. Sound of boatslip, reek of diesel, Broad Bay’s wake through the harbour – a rugged line the fuel slicks on the water’s surface, our keel slurring petrol-rainbows. Light quibbling on the swell. We nosed through the chowder of harbour water: kelp, oranges, plastic milk bottles, sea gunk. 

One more example from The Old Ways – this a wonderful evocation of the little Hebridean peninsula called Aird Bheag, where Macfarlane starts his search for Manus’s path:

The peninsula was a beirgh, or a’ bheirgh, a loan-word from the Norse that designates “a promontory or point with a bare, usually vertical rock-face, and often with a narrow neck.” Its cliffs were pinkish with feldspar. Inland, near Griomabhal, I could see a golden eagle, its primaries extended like delicate fingers, roaming on a late-day hunt. A tern beat upwind: scissory wings, its black head seemingly eyeless, its movement within the air veery and unpredictable as a pitcher’s knuckle-ball. Creamy waves moshed and milked on the beach and rocks, making rafts of floating foam just offshore and sending spray shooting above the level of the tent. Wave-surged infralittoral rock, tide-swept circalittoral rock, micro-terrains of lichen and moss. Far out to sea there were breaches in the cloud through which sun fell. 

Roger Deakin, in Waterlog, swims in at least fifty different locations throughout the British Isles. Each is specificly and individually evoked. Here, for example, is Belnahua, one of the Slate Islands, in the Firth of Lorn, Scotland: 

Everything on Belnahua was ruined, except its wild beauty. There were two rows of dilapidated slate cottages carpeted in long grass with just their walls and fireplaces left. Holed and half-demolished by the winter storms, what was left of their windows framed dramatic views of the Garvellachs and the distant Paps of Jura across the sea. Bits of derelict machinery lay everywhere: cogs and pulleys, shafts, spindles, wheels, gears, cranes, pitted bollards and rusting fragments of narrow-gauge track. The beaches were all silver, black and grey, with fine black sand and all denominations of the island’s slate coinage, some flecked with a starry night sky of fool’s gold, others striated with the finest random white pencil lines of quartz, the doodling of mermaids. The tides had sorted and screened them by size, stacking them like books end-on in flowing lines and whorls that traced the eddies and turbulence that clamoured over them.

And here is Jaywick Sands, a village on the Essex coast of England, one of Deakin’s favorite places, because “Nobody has spent much money on Jaywick, with the result that you can still feel some of its original atmosphere and character”:

I turned and looked back towards the shore and the curious collection of bungalows that lined the seafront, lit by the dying reflected sunlight, their wooden clapboarding picked out in garish colours. At one end of the little curved sandy bay was the Jaywick Beach Bar, with a fifteen-foot square of concrete jutting out into the water, and beyond it, further off, a Martello tower. A fishing smack rode at anchor, trailing a wake that ploughed the smooth surface of the tide-stream. The bungalows were tiny, with much brightly-coloured picket fencing around them. A light plane flew in over the bay and came in to land behind the houses on a tiny airfield that had a windsock and a board advertising pleasure flights along the coast. The ancient gnarled remains of a groyne heaved out of the sand, the concrete slabs thrown together like dice by storms. The defiantly anachronistic spirit of Jaywick was distilled in a sign on the miniature promenade advertising the pub: NEVER SAY DIE – LIVE ENTERTAINMENT. The promenade was tiny, more of a sea path squeezed in behind the sea wall, and the bungalows, with their stilts and verandas, crammed together facing out to sea like punters at a racecourse trying to get a view. On the skyline of low sand-dunes a horse and rider trotted round and round. 

And here is the Oasis open-air pool in Covent Garden, London, on a cold November evening:

I walked out to the pool across a coconut rug thoughtfully laid across the frosty paving stones. The air was biting, but the water was simmering at eighty-four Fahrenheit, and steaming. A dense cotton-wool mist rose off the surface, diffusing the lights and reflecting off the lifeguard’s glass kiosk.  But it was too cold to sit about. He or she (I couldn’t see) paced up and down by the pool muffled in a thick parka with a tracksuit underneath and a bathing costume several layers in, like a Russian doll. All around, London was breathing, clicking and buzzing under an orange sky. Floating on my back in the pool and looking up, I saw the balconies of council flats and bright offices lit up with people at computers in the windows, and, up above, a black starry sky with now and again a jet. As a swimmer, I felt connected to everyday life in a way I never do in an indoor pool. I had ridden here under my own steam, and here I was in the centre of London gazing up at the stars in the utmost luxury of a heated outdoor pool. It seemed the height of civilization. Yet this was no exclusive private pool; with a Leisure Card from Camden Council, you could get in for £1. With Lubetkin’s High Point pool in Highgate, this must be the best cold-weather pool in London. It was exhilarating to swim wild and free in the middle of the big city in November, breathing in the sharp, frosty air, limbs suffused with the warmth of the pool. Other swimmers materialized out of the mist and glided past silently. All you heard was the immediate lapping of the water and the big rumble and hum of the invisible city beyond the ramparts of flats and offices. Just a few yards away through the darkness, other bathers were visible through the glass walls of the indoor pool. It was warm in there, but there is no warmth as satisfying as heated outdoor water on a frosty night. Floating in the surreal space between extremes of hot and cold, it is so different from the physical world you are used to that you are suspended in time. 

I love that passage. Deakin puts me squarely there in that splendid outdoor pool. I feel his exhilaration. 

Speaking of thereness, Lawrence Osborne, in The Wet and the Dry, evokes bars so vividly he makes you feel you’re right there with him, sipping a gin and tonic or a vodka martini or a glass of arak or whatever he’s having. For example:

In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet. 

Here’s Time Out in Beirut:

Beirut is the only city where the bar and muezzin cannot dominate each other. From Abdel Wahab, Furn El Hayek runs gently downhill toward Saints Coeurs, past Ottoman houses with their balconies and high arches intact, the gardens dark with hundred-foot trees. Near the bottom, on St. Joseph University Street, stands Time Out, which may be the oldest continuously running bar in Beirut. It is built into three floors of a house that was once a table d’hôte in the late nineteenth century and is now like an English country home with a basement of white stone vaults. Here is that perfect bar: a worn-in room with, at its center, a great wall of bottles in niches, and around it armchairs and oils and shaded lamps and, leaning on said bar, the white-haired and bearded Jacques Tabet, who during the civil war was known cryptically as Beirut Number Three. Tabet is Beirut’s most cantankerous and generous bar owner, and his creation is very like himself: interconnected rooms like salons in a private house, an unlit garden terrace, corners where men can smoke cigars without occidental disapproval. A bar for adults, in other words, and not for screaming children. In New York it would have been closed down long ago for this very reason.

And here is the Windsor in Cairo:

The Windsor is my favorite bar in the Middle East. It is, when you first enter it, still an officer’s mess equipped with all the expected decorations of a male space: dozens of large and small antlers protrude from its walls, some so small they are like bones of tiny extinct species unique to the Sahara. The chandeliers are rings of enmeshed antlers. Antelopes, gazelles, ibex, dark wood, low bookcases, shaded lamps, and bar shelves filled with dusty bottles of Omar Khayyam wine and Stella, the Egyptian national beer. It is a perfect anachronism. It must have been one of the bars of Fermor and Durrell in 1942.... The Windsor sits unnoticed within the backstreets of Cairo’s downtown, the core of the nineteenth-century city that has for decades decayed like compost until it is almost unrecognizable as the downtown that was once magnificent, the city of King Farouk and Omar Sharif and Om Kalthoum. A city of Parisian boulevards and balconied apartment blocks lifted from the Rue Réaumur. The city of the Café Riche and wondrous hotel bars and a life of flaneurs rarely inconvenienced by religion. The Paris of the East, pace Beirut.

Description of bars is one way to evoke place. Another is description of people. That will be the subject of my next post in this series. 

Acts of Seeing: Comacchio

John MacDougall, Comacchio (2023)

One of my favorite places in the world is Comacchio, in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. There’s a path that goes along the lagoon there that affords views of some of the most arresting fishing shacks I’ve ever seen. This one, for example, so rickety-looking, ramshackle, and time-worn. Yet, so enduring, too. The vivid dabs of red of the wild poppy blossoms make the picture. I love the light – the glorious Italian saltwater sunlight! I wish I were there now. 

The Art of Quotation (Part IX)

Randall Jarrell (portrait from poemanalysis.com)

One of the most memorable essays I’ve ever read is Randall Jarrell’s “Some Lines from Whitman” (included in his 1953 collection Poetry and the Age). The piece is almost all quotation! Jarrell says, “To show Whitman for what he is one does not need to praise or explain or argue, one needs simply to quote.” And that’s exactly what he does. Here’s a sample:

Even a few of his phrases are enough to show us that Whitman was no sweeping rhetorician, but a poet of the greatest and oddest delicacy and originality and sensitivity, so far as words are concerned. This is, after all, the poet who said, “Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch”; who said, “Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones”; who said, “Agonies are one of my changes of garments”; who saw grass as the “flag of my disposition,” saw “the sharp-peak’d farmhouse, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters,” heard a plane’s “wild ascending lisp,” and saw and heard how at the amputation “what is removed drops horribly in a pail.” 

Jarrell goes on like this for a couple of pages and then shifts from quoting phrases to quoting passages. At one point, he asks, “How can one quote enough?” Abundance of quotation is Jarrell’s way of arguing for Whitman’s genius. It's a brilliant method! 

Dennis Lim's Remarkable "How Should a Pixel Be?"

A still from Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf (2025)

Every now and then a review appears that is so original, so audacious, so delightful, it blows my mind. Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” is such a piece. And so is Patricia Lockwood’s “Malfunctioning Sex Robot.” And so is T. J. Clark’s recent “V is for Vagina.” Now comes Dennis Lim’s transfixing “How Should a Pixel Be?” in this month’s New York Review of Books. It’s a review of Alexandre Koberidze’s new film Dry Leaf. 

What is thrilling about Lim’s piece is that he defends what, for me, seems artistically indefensible, and that he does so brilliantly and persuasively. Dry Leaf, Lim tells us, was shot with the camera of a nearly twenty-year-old mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson W595. Lim says,

The W595 shoots video at fifteen frames per second—producing a choppier moving image than the customary twenty-four frames per second, deemed the minimum for perceived smoothness of motion—and a maximum resolution of 240 pixels, which is to say its images contain at least eighty times less visual information than the current 4K standard. 

Lim comments, “Even at the time it would have been inconceivable to use a camera like this, with its weak sensors and puny pixel counts, for any professional video production, let alone to shoot an entire feature film.” The result is a film consisting entirely of blurry images – an “unstable smear,” in Lim’s words. Who wants to watch that? Not me. I hate blurry images. I love sharp focus – the sharper the better. Lim is well aware of the issue. He quotes the scholar Martine Beugnet: “an unexpectedly blurry image draws attention to the workings of the camera; it risks undoing the illusion of reality.” Yes, exactly.

Dry Leaf is a road movie – “a quest narrative, in which a father travels the length and breadth of Georgia in search of his adult daughter, a sports photographer who has left home for reasons unknown.” This sounds like my kind of film. Why did Koberidze have to ruin it by using an outmoded camera that blurs everything? 

This is where Lim’s piece surprises. He loves Dry Leaf’s blur. He compares it to Impressionism:

Dry Leaf lingers at length on landscapes, on their flora and fauna, on the weather and light conditions that determine their legibility before the gaze of an easily overwhelmed camera. These soft, vague images are so distant from contemporary photographic realism that, for many, the reference that will first spring to mind is painting. Koberidze encourages this comparison with a few still lifes, directing our attention to, say, a plate of apples or a handful of freshly picked apricots. The landscapes at times evoke Impressionist and Post-impressionist vistas, the practically countable pixels suggesting the visible brushstrokes of impasto.

Okay, I can dig this. I love impasto. Lim continues,

Experienced as cinema, every frame of Dry Leaf enacts a drama of form. Figure and ground lose their distinctness. A smudge turns out to be a person, who seems to vanish before our eyes as they recede toward the horizon only to reappear moments later. Clouds take on serrated edges; power cables resemble dotted lines. The pixel, an unwanted video artifact, becomes a compositional element, a visible unit of information that periodically fills the screen with grids and gradients. Even apparently static shots are alive with contingency. Scenes in which nothing much happens are in fact trembling battles between darkness and light, as the camera struggles to adapt to its environment. The throbbing lag of the image, a result of digital compression, comes to seem like the very pulse of the movie, its electronic heartbeat. In its lack of nuance and tendency to overcorrect, the color range produces striking, often beautiful distortions: radioactive sunsets, a golden-hour glow. Paradoxically, the lo-fi aesthetic betrays a sensitivity to the atmospheric, or at least a compatibility with the gaseous and liquid states that Koberidze keeps returning to: the ever-present fog and mist of mountain terrain, the incessant flows of streams and waterfalls.

Lim makes me want to see this strange film. He calls Dry Leaf “a bet as well as an experiment”: “Koberidze’s wager is that these blurred images, to twenty-first-century eyes accustomed to the crisp edges of high definition, will be not just sufficient but replenishing.”

I never thought I’d see any value in a blurred image. Lim has persuaded me otherwise. 

May 25, 2026 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that caught my attention is Alex Ross’s “Crisis Mode.” It’s a review of the contemporary-music festival Witten Days for New Chamber Music that takes place each spring in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Ross says he attended Witten primarily to hear new and recent works by Chaya Czernowin, “a composer I would follow anywhere.” I’d never heard of her. I’d never heard of Witten, either. And I’m not a fan of chamber music. But I am a fan of Ross’s writing. “Crisis Mode” contains some brilliant passages, especially the final two paragraphs in which Ross considers Czernowin’s “No! A Lament for the Innocent.” He writes,

For the most part, “No!” inhabits an abstract soundscape, though an intensely fraught one. Instruments and voices accumulate into immense, sustained, saturating dissonances, with a snare drum cutting through the tear-gas haze. Characteristically, Czernowin’s control of timbre, texture, and structure yields a kind of cataclysmic grandeur. Then, at the very end, she kicks away the frame of art and makes things blunt. Singer and her doppelgänger plead together: “Don’t take my child away / Don’t take my child / Don’t / No.” The final syllables accelerate into a blur, whereupon a ritual of wailing erupts. A composer writes to the limits of her art, and steps into the real. 

I vote that one of the best music descriptions of the year. The last line is inspired – as fine an accolade as any artist could hope to receive. 

Nick Laird's " 'The Music of What Happens' "

I’ve just finished reading Nick Laird’s “ ‘The Music of What Happens’ ” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2026), a review of The Poems of Seamus Heaney. What a great piece! Laird praises Heaney for, among other things, his “uncanny descriptive abilities.” He says that Wallace Stevens’ observation “Description is revelation” was “never truer than for Heaney.” I agree. Recall his description of butter in his brilliant “Churning Day”: “Their short stroke quickened, suddenly / a yellow curd was weighting the churned up white, / heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight / that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer, / heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl.” And this beauty from “Oysters,” one of my favorite poems: “Alive and violated / they lay on their beds of ice: / Bivalves: the split bulb / And philandering sigh of ocean. / Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.” And this memorable image from “The Grauballe Man”: “As if he had been poured / in tar, he lies / on a pillow of turf / and seems to weep // the black river of himself. / The grain of his wrists / is like bog oak, / the ball of his heel // like a basalt egg.” And this from “Strange Fruit”: “Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd. / Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.” And this from “Song”: “A rowan like a lipsticked girl.” I could go on and on quoting these marvelous poems. Heaney is one of literature’s great describers. I cherish his work. 

Credit: The above portrait of Seamus Heaney is by Yann Kebbi.

Max Norman's "Quoting the World"

Eugène Atget, Pontoise, Place du Grand Martroy (1902)

Max Norman’s “Quoting the World,” in this month’s New York Review of Books, is an excellent review of the exhibition “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation,” at the International Center of Photography, New York. Norman observes that Atget’s photos of the deserted streets of old Paris “still breathe mystery a century after his death.” He says they are “blissfully unburdened by ideas or narratives or even a discernible style.”

I think this is essentially true. Atget’s photos are enigmatic. But do they lack style? Anthony Lane, in his 1994 New Yorker essay on Atget, writes,

There is no mistaking an Atget photograph, but no easy means of describing it, either; he seems to impose no style, and yet no one else, faced with the same scene, could ever have arrived at the same likeness.

Lane identifies several key elements of Atget’s style:

The edges of his buildings are pure and hard, unbothered by background fuss, but as you look into the distance the light relaxes into a feathery haze. You are left with the extraordinary sensation that perspective is a matter not only of space but of time: in front of your eyes it is high noon, but day seems to be breaking at the end of every street.

There is something tense and poised in the decorum of an Atget composition: the camera tends to be tucked down low on its tripod, affording a broad and vulnerable angle, rather than the tight command of a lofted viewpoint. 

His lens never flinched from clutter, of course—from the crust of grime on a stately façade, from unreadable posters peeling off a wall—but the gaze that he levelled at it was clean, wholly immune to the many-angled, tight-nerved scrutiny of the modernists.

That is one reason his work has barely dated: you can fill it with Frenchness—any kind you like, from whatever period, according to taste. It beckons you into its unexceptional landscapes, its well-stocked but crowdless shops, and your gaze is free to wander, because there’s no one else around.

And Lane makes this crucial point: 

His prey was more elusive than you might expect—not the proud, orderly streets planned by Haussmann but all that was ignored in that grand design: the arcana of the old city, its brothels and doorways and dirty fountains, the stages on which its daily drama was played out. Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice, but he couldn’t have cared less about seeing the sights. Not once, in almost forty years behind a camera, did he point it at the Eiffel Tower.

Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice – right there, I think, is Atget’s governing aesthetic. 

Inspired Sentence 11

But what are those quadrangles with a colorful chess-board pattern under the hooves of the black cow?

I love that question. It’s so specific, it verges on the surreal. It’s from Zbigniew Herbert’s “Lascaux,” the first essay in his exquisite 1962 collection Barbarian in the Garden. Herbert is in the Lascaux cave, looking at the paintings of animals on the walls and vault. He’s unable to answer his question. He knows there are theories, but none are certain. He says, “Amidst the raucous breathing of the Lascaux animals, the geometric signs are silent and perhaps will remain silent forever.” Nevertheless, his question is a beauty – a form of serious noticing. 

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #4 Ian Frazier's "On the Prison Highway"

Photo by Igor Mikhalev, from Ian Frazier's "On the Prison Highway"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Ian Frazier’s unforgettable “On the Prison Highway” (August 30, 2010).

This is one of the most profound travel pieces I’ve ever read. It takes us to the Russian heart of darkness – a deserted Siberian prison camp. Most of the physical travel takes place in the first paragraph:

In early March of 2005, I flew from New York to Vladivostok and met my Russian guide, Sergei Lunev, whom I’d travelled with before. Sergei, a hale fellow in his sixties, is the head of a robotics lab in St. Petersburg who guides various expeditions for the adventure and the extra cash. From Vladivostok Sergei and I flew to Irkutsk, took a train around the southern end of Lake Baikal to Ulan Ude, went partway up the lake by bus, continued to the lake’s northern end in a hired car on Baikal’s winter ice road for two hundred and twenty miles, caught the Baikal-Amur Mainline at the tip of the lake, rode for fifty-some hours on the train, and then hired other cars to take us farther north, to the city of Yakutsk and beyond.

That is an immense journey. If you want to know the details, you can find them in Frazier’s superb Travels in Siberia (2010), one of my all-time favorite books. The purpose of the journey is to find Soviet-era prison camps. Frazier has read about them. He wants to see them. He says, “On previous Siberian journeys, I had looked for prisons, without much success. This time, I was determined to find them.”

Past Yakutsk, Frazier and his guide travel on prisoner-built roads, the last of which, called the Topolinskaya Highway, no longer functions year-round. Frazier says of it, “Its ingeniously engineered log bridges were falling down and the streams they spanned had to be crossed on the ice.” 

Stalin-era prison camps (“lagers”), long abandoned, appear at regular intervals along this road. About thirty miles from the reindeer-herder village of Topolinoe, their driver points to a guard tower and other structures on one side of the road. They stop. Frazier and Sergei get out and wade toward them in thigh-deep snow.

Frazier’s description of the camp is extraordinary, becoming ever more immersive as details come into focus.

He begins,

The lager lay in a narrow valley between sparsely wooded hills. The gray, scraggly trees, which did not make it to the hills’ higher slopes, grew more thickly near the lager and partly surrounded it; a few small birches had sprung up inside what had been the camp’s perimeter. Their bare branches contrasted with the white of the snow on the roof of the barracks building, whose wall, set back under the eaves, was dark. In the whiteness of an open field a guard tower tilted sideways like someone putting all his weight on one leg. A ladder-like set of steps still led up to it, and two eye-like window openings added to the anthropomorphic effect. In the endless and pristine snow cover I saw no tire tracks, road ruts, abandoned oil drums, or other sign that any human had been here since the camp was left to the elements, half a century before.

He continues:

At first view, the camp looked as I’d expected. There were the fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s, the ink-black barbed wire, the inch-long barbs shaped like bayonets. Some of the posts leaned in one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts, several metres beyond, and the low, shameful barracks, with its two doors and three windows, fit exactly with the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in the mind. Sergei had drifted off to the left to videotape the lager from the side. I went in by the front gate, which was standing open. When I was inside the perimeter, the camp lost its generic-ness and became instead this particular Russian structure of its own.

He describes its fence posts and walls:

To begin with, the whole place was as handmade as a mud hut. The fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s weren’t factory stock that had been produced elsewhere but plain logs, peeled and smoothed, with narrow boards atop them to complete the L. And the side of the barracks wall, which from a distance had appeared to be stucco, was actually a daubed plastering over thin strips of lath that crossed each other diagonally, like basketwork. I broke a piece of the plastering off in my hand; at one time it had been painted a pale yellow and it crumbled easily. It seemed to be nothing more than a spackle of mud and river sand.

Aside from the nails and the barbed wire, I could see almost no factory-made product that had been used in the construction. Next to the windows were white ceramic insulators that had probably held electrified wire; no trace of mullions or window glass remained. The roof beam ran parallel to the building’s length, and along the slope of the roof at each end a facing board about five inches wide had been nailed. These boards covered the raw edge of the roof and extended from beam to eaves, and at the end of each board a very small swirl of scrollwork had been carved. The embellishment was so out of place it caught the eye. I wondered what carpenter or designer had thought to put a touch of decoration on such a building.

He describes the barracks:

The floor of the barracks was worn planking, tightly joined and still sound. I saw nothing on it but a few twists of straw and the wooden sole of a shoe. A short, cylindrical iron stove rusted near a corner. Its stovepipe was gone and the hole for it in the plank roof above had been covered over. Prisoners who had lived in barracks like this reported that the stove usually heated a radius of five to six metres. As this building was maybe ten metres from end to end, areas of it must always have been cold. From inside you could see the logs that the walls were made of. The cracks between the logs had been chinked with moss. The barracks space had been divided into several rooms, with bunks set into the walls. The bunks also were made of bare planks—some planed on both sides, some planed on only one. Planks with the bark still on them had been fitted into the bunks so that the bark side faced down.

Looking at the interior of the barracks, Frazier thinks of the enormous amount of suffering that occurred there:

Often prisoners in places like this had to sleep on the unimproved planking, or on thin mattresses stuffed with sawdust. For covering they might have had a single blanket, or nothing besides the clothes they wore during the day. Mornings began as early as 4 a.m., when the guards would awaken them by pounding with a hammer on a saw blade. That wakeup alarm and the screeching of the guard dogs’ chains on the wires stretched between the watchtowers as the dogs ran back and forth were characteristic sounds of the camps. Before the prisoners went out to work, they were given breakfast—usually soup with a small piece of fish or meat, and bread. Even in 1977, not a lean time, the diet in Soviet strict-regime camps provided only twenty-six hundred calories per prisoner per day, and less in the punishment blocks and sick wards. The international standard for a person actively working is thirty-two hundred to forty-two hundred calories per day. Like almost all labor-camp prisoners, the ones in this barracks would have been hungry almost all the time.

He notes that the death toll could be cruelly high in camps like this one: 

Well over a million died in the camps just in 1937-1938, the Great Purge’s peak years. A main goal of the Soviet labor-camp system was to take those citizens the Soviet Union did not need, for political or social or unfathomable reasons, and convert their lives to gold and timber, which could be traded abroad.

He says,

When I looked at the barracks’ tiers of bunks I pictured male zeks—the word for gulag prisoners—lying on them, but the prisoners here might have been women, too. Female zeks worked in timber-cutting camps and on road-building details, and even mined gold. Their resilience was greater than men’s, as was their ability to withstand pain. Or perhaps this barracks had been one of those occupied by and completely under the control of criminals. This distressingly numerous class played the camp system to exempt themselves from labor and, with the encouragement of the authorities, preyed on the political prisoners. The criminals’ ethics and speech seeped into everybody’s life. Political prisoners later said that the criminals in the camps were more dangerous than the meagre food and the killing work conditions. The gulag also had lagers for children. Eugenia Ginzburg, who served eighteen years in the camps of Kolyma, wrote that when a camp of child prisoners was given two guard-dog puppies to raise the children at first could not think of anything to name them. The poverty of their surroundings had stripped their imaginations bare. Finally, they chose names from common objects they saw every day. They named one puppy Ladle and the other Pail.

What strikes Frazier most forcefully is the camp’s “overwhelming aura of absence.” He writes, 

The deserted prison camp just sat there—unexcused, untorn-down, unexplained. During its years of operation, it had been a secret, and in some sense it still was. Horrors had happened here, and/or miseries and sufferings and humiliations short of true horrors. “No comment,” the site seemed to say.

Frazier wants the secrecy dispelled. He wants these prison camps marked as historic sites, reminders of the horror of Stalinism and man’s inhumanity to man. He says,

I thought that this camp, and all the others along this road, needed large historical markers in front of them, with names and dates and details; and there should be ongoing archeology here, and areas roped off, and painstaking excavation, and well-informed docents in heated kiosks giving talks to visitors. Teams of researchers should be out looking for camp survivors, if any, and for former guards, and for whoever had baked the bread in the bakery. Extensive delving into K.G.B. or Dalstroi files should be finding out who exactly was imprisoned here when, and what they were in for, and what became of them. The zek engineers and builders who made the hand-constructed bridges should be recognized and their photographs placed on monuments beside the road, and the whole Topolinskaya Highway, for all its hundred and eighty-nine kilometres, should be declared a historic district, and the graves, of which there may be many, should be found and marked and given requiem.

What monster was responsible for these camps? Frazier points his finger directly at one man – Stalin. He says, 

The camp I was looking at, and all the camps along this road, and the road itself, were Stalin. His was the single animating spirit of the place. The road project and its camps had come into existence by his fiat, had continued to exist in fear of his will, and had ended like a blown-out match with his death. The fact that the world has not yet decided what to say about Stalin was the reason these camps were standing with no change or context; the sense of absence here was because of that.

The piece ends unforgettably:

The strange feeling of absence that prevailed in the frozen silence here had to do with the secrecy and evil of the place’s conception, and with its permanent abandonment, in shame, after its author was gone. Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind.

May 11 & 18, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is James Wood’s absorbing “Visiting Hours” – a review of Harriet Clark’s novel The Hill. Wood calls it “superb” – “a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman.” What’s it about? Why is it “deprived”? Wood tells us:

It is narrated by Suzanna, who lives with her grandparents in New York City. Nearly every weekend—first with her grandfather, then with a nun named Sister Claudine, and, finally, once she’s nearly a teen-ager, on her own—Suzanna makes a trip out of town to visit her mother in a hilltop prison. Only gradually does it emerge that her mother is serving a very long sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the death of a security guard. It has the form and emphasis of a coming-of-age story but is devoid of the usual content. We see Suzanna through her developing phases—at nine, at twelve, at fifteen, and then about to graduate from high school, a period when “a great venturing forth had commenced” (though not for Suzanna, who does not apply to college). 

About halfway through his review, Wood springs a surprise: The Hill is based on Clark’s real life. Wood writes, 

Harriet Clark, born in 1980, is the daughter of the Weather Underground activist Judy Clark, who took part in the robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nanuet, New York, in 1981, an incident that left three people dead. Judy was found guilty of murder in 1983, and served thirty-eight years, mostly in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Harriet was thirty-eight when her mother was released, in 2019.

And then he asks an excellent question: “Why fictionalize such remarkable facts?” His answer is interesting:

Clark’s wise remedy is to strip her fiction of most of those facts, reducing the local references so that the narrative shifts away from singular autobiography toward singular emblem. Not Harriet Clark but an isolated girl in the city; not Bedford Hills but a hilltop compound named only Hillcrest; not the notorious Brink’s robbery but a heist that went “too far.”

The effect of Clark’s reductions, Wood says, is twofold: (1) it “turns its stripped story into a kind of bitter allegory, in which those stages of development and fulfillment are ironized by an institution that deprives them of meaning: the prison”; and (2), it spares Clark from having to “revisit and adjudicate the ethics of her mother’s radicalism.” 

I like Wood’s question. But I’m not persuaded by his answers. Clark chose to transform her life story into allegory. That’s her right. And it appears she’s written a brilliant one. But, as for me, I prefer the facts. 

Wood’s review contains an inspired sentence – the last line of a passage in which he discusses Suzanna’s grandmother Sylvie, who, he says, is “at the heart of the book.” Here’s the passage:

One day, Sylvie takes Suzanna, age nine, to the bank that her mother robbed, forces her to go inside on her own, and then inexplicably drives away. Suzanna understands this particular lesson to be that “the arrangement of my family was neither destined to be nor destined to last.” Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. “According to who?” Sylvie asks. “You don’t even have to go to school.” Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist.

I love that last sentence. It makes me want to read the book, to see if Suzanna is somehow able to "find her own meaning on which to subsist." 

Helen Rosner's Review of #1 NYC Restaurant Kabawa

Photo by Yael Malka, from Helen Rosner's "The Caribbean Resturant Reinventing the Momofuku Empire"

I see that the Caribbean restaurant Kabawa tops The New York Times’ 2026 “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City” list. New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner reviewed Kabawa last year, calling it “easygoing and joyous.” She wrote, 

Though there’s no shortage of high points at Kabawa—among them a rainbow-sprinkle-studded baton of flan so dense it verges on cheesecake—the restaurant’s success lies less in the strength of any individual dish than in the ebullient sum of its parts. 

She says, “an almost euphoric pleasure comes from simply being there, pumped full of life by the colors and the smells.” 

In a year-end piece called “The Best Things I Ate in 2025,” Rosner picked Kabawa’s curry goat as one of her favorite dishes. She says,

Tender shredded goat meat, luscious and gently gamy, is formed into a tidy rectangle, then seared to a crackly crispness. The fiery sauce Creole spooned over top is dark, thick, complex, and alive with spices and a bit of fishy funk from dried scallops. The dish is crowned with a pile of glossy fried curry leaves, whose woodsy, otherworldly aroma eddies around your face as the dish is placed before you, a promise of imminent pleasure.

I love critics who are guided by pleasure. It’s Rosner’s chief criterion. Kabawa passed the test spectacularly. 

T. J. Clark's Extraordinary "V is for Vagina"

Willem de Kooning, Suburb in Havana (1958)

I just want to spotlight an extraordinary art review in this month’s London Review of Books – T. J. Clark’s "V is for Vagina." It’s a consideration of Willem de Kooning’s 1958 Suburb in Havana. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more granular description of a painting, even by Clark, than this one. Clark analyzes it stroke by stroke. Here’s a sample:

Physical description first. I warn you I shall probably try your patience for the next page or so; but I think that the only way to de Kooning’s intention, which is where I want to end up, is by way of process – by trying to reconstruct the sequence of marks in the case, so as to arrive at an intuition of what the sequence may have been aiming for. I believe Suburb in Havana originally had an off-white ground, maybe with a bit of yellow already worked into it. The big blank area going up from the bottom left corner looks to me like a survival from this first stage. The paint hereabouts is thin enough in places for the canvas grain to show through. Yellow seems to have been the first colour put over the off-white ground – certainly that’s true of the yellow in the picture’s lower reaches. There are several streaks and dollops of blue paint on top of the yellow, which seemingly landed when the yellow was half dry. Obviously de Kooning did not proceed from yellow to blue without looking back. If you focus on the areas where the two colours meet, particularly the painting’s horizon line and the broad yellow scrawl just underneath it, you see straightaway that the blue and yellow were applied alternately – the yellow scrawl has pulled up some blue within it and the horizon line of yellow is transparent to the blue underneath. It looks like the sliver of yellow at the picture’s top right corner was added on top of the blue, though it is hard to say what is going on in this area with any certainty. Clearly, to return to firmer ground, the great vertical stroke of yellow to the left was put down when the blue was already there. You can see spatters of yellow falling across the blue field from the first thick clot of colour at the stroke’s top right. The yellow turns green, quite dramatically, in among the rust brown at the top left corner, and once you notice this, you begin to register how much ‘yellow plus blue equals green’ is happening locally elsewhere, all around the yellow vertical and across the transverse yellow scrawling. This is painting in the wet – it is meant to look liquid, and the paint detail tells you that the look is true to the facts.

Clark continues in this vein for several more paragraphs. His review is a tour de force of descriptive analysis. He concludes that Suburb in Havana intends its viewer to focus on the dramatic difference between wet paint and dry: “The yellow scrawl is meant to look liquid: liquidity is bound up with fluency and therefore speed. The dirty brown slash, by contrast, is meant to look as dry as they come – obdurately dry, like old faecal matter.” Yes, you read that last part correctly. Clark is comparing the brown slash to something you might see in a lavatory: “A vagina put up on a dirty yellow wall with something that looks like faeces.” This does not appear to be a favorable view. Yet, Clark, ever the foxy dialectician, also describes de Kooning’s picture as “beautiful, colourful, internally coherent.” It’s an astonishing review. Highly recommended.