BRIEFLY NOTED THE GODDESS POSE, by Michelle Goldberg (Knopf ). “Traditional yoga is supposed to teach you how to renounce worldly goals,” Goldberg writes in this event-crammed biography. Yet for her subject, Indira Devi, yoga was about ambition. Born Eugenia Vassilievna, in 1899, she was a Latvian actress and socialite, who flitted through various jobs and countries before introducing yoga, still little known in the United States, in Los Angeles in the late forties. Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson were among the clients at her studio, on Sunset Strip. The second half of Devi’s life, similarly fast-paced, included stints in Saigon, Mexico, and Buenos Aires. She lived to be a hundred and two. IRREPRESSIBLE, by Emily Bingham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Henrietta Bingham, the great-aunt of the author of this haunting biography, is best remembered for her association with the Bloomsbury group. A wealthy, charismatic lesbian débutante from Kentucky, she traipsed about London singing to a mandolin and seducing everyone she met (she was Dora Carrington’s longtime lover). Yet, Bingham writes, she always felt like an outsider. As the Jazz Age gave way to a harsher moral climate, she sought a cure for her orientation: years of psychoanalysis, electroshock therapy, barbiturates, and the threat of a lobotomy ushered in a tragic demise. Bingham captures both the giddy rebellion of her aunt’s youth and her slow, startling unravelling. I REFUSE,
by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Graywolf ). Set in Norway and covering half a century, this novel follows three childhood friends—Tommy, Jim, and Tommy’s younger sister, Siri—from adolescent trauma to the reckonings of middle age. Drinking, arson, a suicide attempt, and unsettled relationships all appear as fallout from an early confrontation between Tommy and his violent father. Characters take turns narrating, in a way that lends their struggles great immediacy, though Petterson’s choice of an episodic and nonlinear form muffles our sense of their development. Striking moments of reflection, as when Tommy and Jim travel or take in a gorgeously described landscape, bring agony to the forefront. THE SYMPATHIZER, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove). This comic picaresque set in nineteen-seventies California is narrated by a Vietcong mole who has allowed himself to be groomed by the C.I.A.—to the point where the Vietnamese Communists no longer recognize this Beatles-loving person as one of their own. The novel’s best parts are painful, hilarious exposures of white tone-deafness, from an Oriental-studies professor who calls his Japanese-American secretary “Miss Butterfly” to a buffoonish Hollywood director—inspired, Nguyen’s acknowledgments note, by Francis Ford Coppola—who hires the narrator as a consultant for a cumbersome melodrama. The ending, which involves scenes of torture and a dystopian epiphany, feels out of keeping with the rest of the book, but the preceding satire is delicious. THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 29, 2015
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