Early in the morning of 16th October 2012, seven valuable artworks were stolen from the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. The theft was world news. But what first seemed like a sophisticated burglary by professionals, turned out to be the work of a few small-time Romanian criminals who had no idea what they were getting themselves into. They knew about house burglaries, not art, and they certainly didn’t know about selling art.
This is the story of the Kunsthal robbery, based on the case files and conversations with those involved.
My mother Nadia and I were going back to a place we’d never been. Perhaps it was sorrow or the fact that we had purchased last-minute plane tickets and had to consult these maps in haste, but the eyes played tricks. Street names had changed after independence. Our family had left Tunisia under occupation and had become accustomed to that state. Liberation confused me. In reality, the map movements I observed had taken decades and cost many lives. Prisons rang with gunshots and our anthem. But thumbing through paper and digital maps—old maps, re-creations from memory, Google Maps—the avenues appeared to crack and shift in seconds.
I’m not certain there had been municipal maps of the same nature before. Maps are Arab, but I am not sure that’s true of order, in the constrictive Western sense, down to the minutia of city grids, precisely marked streets and plots of land. Maybe these were a prison we’d come to accept. It’s hard to know what came before, since before only exists theoretically. The past had been thoroughly decimated. When my grandmother Daida died, she took with her an entire civilization, containing time immemorial, and all I could do now was to match maps to know where we were, and that we were, once.
I’ve always been wary of oversharing with my husband. I often tell my friends my news before I tell him. I base this on something I read a long time ago that stuck in me, something about keeping boundaries with the people you love so as not to overrun their love with too much knowing, to keep the relationship exciting—some Esther Perel shit that I can’t actually source in her book. (I have that book at my bedside, but let’s be real; I never actually read it. My husband did and I asked him to summarize.) Anyway, I tweaked it in some weird way in my mind to mean never tell your partner about your life.
When my doctor tells me about the endometriosis, I don’t tell my husband for a few days. A weekend passes and at the end of it I tell him on the couch on Sunday night, and he leaps up—“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?”—alarmed and gripping my hands. I stand awkwardly with him and say, “I’m telling you now.” But it’s the wrong time, I see, and I’ve been somehow disloyal by not doing it in time.
“Who else knows?” he asks; then, shaking his head before I can answer: “You never tell me anything.”
Japan’s sense of the supernatural seemed to be shifting: from the living working to pacify the spirits of the dead, to the dead being called upon to pacify the spirits of the living, rescuing them from the uncertainties – and misplaced certainties – of modern life, and recalling them to older, more natural and fulfilling ways of perceiving and living in the world.
Fast-forward a century, and in the shadow of the disasters of 2011 – earthquake and tsunami, followed by a nuclear meltdown – the ghosts of Japan seemed once again to be up to something new.
As one of the greatest challenges facing the planet, climate change deserves serious treatment by a great writer who combines deep reporting with a compelling literary style — someone who can explain the overwhelming scientific evidence of warming and its human causes, and of the need for action.
William T. Vollmann would seem to be just the writer for that challenging project. Superhumanly prolific and willing to take on the toughest topics, he packs research and voice into his impassioned works. “Rising Up and Rising Down,” his exploration of violence, spans seven volumes. He is also a celebrated novelist, winning the National Book Award in 2005 for “Europe Central.”
So is this the book on climate change we’ve all been waiting for?
For anyone who has ever kept a diary, Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness (first published in the US in 2015) will give pause for thought. The American writer kept a diary over 25 years and it was 800,000 words long. She elects not to publish a word of it in Ongoingness. It turns out she does not wish to look back at what she wrote. This absorbing book – brief as a breath – examines the need to record. It seems, even if she never spells it out, that writing the diary was a compulsive rebuffing of mortality. Like all diarists, she was trying to commandeer time. A diary gives the writer the illusion of stopping time in its tracks. And time – making her peace with its ongoingness – is Manguso’s obsession. Her book hints at diary-keeping as neurosis, a hoarding that is almost a syndrome, a malfunction, a grief at having no way to halt loss.