It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 4852.5291ʹS 12323.5116ʹW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
When he died, on June 9th, 1870, Charles Dickens left behind an unfinished novel. It seems to have been a murder mystery of sorts, called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and he had only written six of the intended twelve installments. Dickens had told his good friend and John Forster a rough idea of the plot, but left no plan or outline for the remainder; “Nothing had been written of the main parts of the design excepting what is found in the published numbers; there was no hint or preparation for the sequel in any notes of chapters in advance. . . the evidence of matured designs never to be accomplished, intentions planned never to be executed, roads of thought marked out never to be traversed, goals shining in the distance never to be reached, was wanting here. It was all a blank.” Thus, when he passed away (of a stroke), he left the novel’s central mystery… well, a mystery.
Today, Santa Monica Beach is one of the most iconic in the world, stretching more than three miles (4.8km) with 245 acres (1sq km) of sand. In 2023, 4.6 million people visited Santa Monica alone. But it wasn't always like that – those golden beaches were once a rocky, wild coastline, until city officials decided to take matters into their own hands.
We live in an era of increasing sensitivity to the provenance of artifacts and their restitution. Major museums in the West devoted to the presentation and preservation of art objects have fitfully begun acknowledging their ties to histories of violence and plunder. Who among us can truly claim immunity when the past comes calling?
Cécile Desprairies’s “The Propagandist,” which was published in France in August, 2023, and long-listed for that year’s Prix Goncourt, is a case in point. Deftly translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, this début novel offers a thoroughgoing inventory of French complicity with the crimes of Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. Desprairies, a historian of Vichy France, focusses on a single French clan, modelled after her own family—their ill-begotten gains and misbegotten ideologies. The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation.
A notable non-francophone example of the breed is American Arthur Barry – “the greatest jewel thief that ever lived,” per Life magazine – who, throughout the 1920s, unnerved (“terrorized” seems too strong a word for someone as polite, well-dressed and non-violent as Barry was) wealthy enclaves around Long Island and Westchester County, New York, with his daring and stealthy home invasions.
In his rollicking new book, A Gentleman and a Thief, Nova Scotia-based author Dean Jobb, mostly recently, of the award-winning The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, sums Barry up as “a bold imposter, a charming con artist and a master cat burglar rolled into one.”