Good morning. Alison Flood writes about the backlash against French writers musing on life during the coronavirus in their posh second homes: “Leïla Slimani and Marie Darrieussecq may be two of France’s most acclaimed writers – but their accounts of life in lockdown in their second homes in the countryside have unleashed an outpouring of resentment among French readers, with one fellow writer even comparing Slimani to Marie Antoinette.”

Anthony Paletta surveys six newly translated works by Stanislaw Lem: “Synopses may not accomplish much in explaining the appeal of the works of Stanislaw Lem. A message arrives from the stars, and humanity comprehensively fails to decipher it. An astronaut returns from a centurylong mission that we barely hear about. A robotic swarm extinguishes nearly all life on a planet, and a mission can’t figure out anything to do to counter it. Yet Lem is one of the few world-renowned science fiction authors not to have written in English, with fans as diverse as Anthony Burgess, Douglas Hofstadter, Carl Sagan, and John Updike. Six of his works have been rereleased by MIT Press this month, all of them excellent.”

Are you in your house more than you’ve ever been? Read these “ten surprising facts about household objects,” not all of which are surprising or obscure, but there are a few items of interest. For example: “The first proto-napkins were lumps of dough called apomagdalie.”

Geoffrey Hosking reviews a new translation of Alexander Tvardovsky’s long poem A Book about a Soldier in The Los Angeles Review of Books: “The men and women on the front loved the Book about a Soldier: its honesty, its positive good humor, its freedom from dogma, and its closeness to the reality of their life . . . Yet, though the text was published to keep up morale and put Red Army soldiers in a good mood — in which it obviously succeeded, to judge by the numerous letters Tvardovsky received — it scarcely mentions anything specifically Soviet: there is little or nothing about towns, industry, the technology even of warfare, and it offers no up-to-date ideology. Most remarkably of all, it never mentions either the Communist Party or Stalin. Soldiers go into battle with the cry ‘Za rodinu!’ (‘For the homeland!’), but not ‘Za Stalina!’ (‘For Stalin!’). Instead, the poem glorifies the comradeship of ordinary soldiers. Like Vasily Grossman in his novels Stalingrad and Life and Fate, Tvardovsky sees this staunch solidarity, rather than political leadership, as the force that wins wars.”

Narendra Modi’s “ghastly Delhi dream”: “Unlike his forerunners, Modi is not constrained by the demands of allies. The triumph of the BJP under his leadership in the elections of 2014 shattered a 25-year spell of coalition governments. A former counsellor to the outgoing government described the result as the birth of a ‘second republic’. What he meant was that the liberal state constituted by the anglicised successors to the British rulers of India had given way to something entirely different. Modi is not merely a prime minister in the traditional sense: he regards himself as nothing less than the father of what his admirers call ‘New India’. It’s hardly surprising that a man of such staggering self-conceit would sooner or later seek to memorialise himself for the ages. And so what had been a relatively minor yet contentious idea to renovate or relocate parliament blossomed under his supervision into a gargantuan vanity project to raise a new New Delhi.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Times, Katrin Bennhold writes about a German village that has put on a Passion Play every tenth year after its residents made a pledge to God during the Bubonic Plague in 1633. Will it happen this year?

“There is no doubt in the mind of the Rev. Thomas Gröner that what happened in his village was a miracle. He says he has proof, too.

“The pandemic had ravaged the village. One in four people are believed to have died. ‘Whole families, gone,’ Father Gröner said.

“Then villagers stood before a cross and pledged to God that if he spared those who remained, they would perform the Passion Play — enacting Jesus’ life, death and resurrection — every 10th year forever after.

“It was 1633. The bubonic plague was still raging in Bavaria. But legend has it that after the pledge, no one else in the village died from it.

“Standing in his church underneath the cross where villagers had once made their promise, Father Gröner held out a battered leather-bound book.

“‘Look,’ he said, his fingers scanning a faded page with tightly packed handwriting that abruptly stops three quarters down. ‘They recorded dozens and dozens of deaths and then — none.’”

Read the rest.

Photo: Abbaye d’Hautecombe

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