cover image WOODEN EYES: Nine Reflections on Distance

WOODEN EYES: Nine Reflections on Distance

Carlo Ginzburg, , trans. by Martin Ryle and Kate Soper. . Columbia Univ., $24.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-231-11960-3

Best known for The Cheese and the Worms, a micro-history about a 16th-century miller with a heretical cosmology, Ginzburg has also produced masterpieces on early modern Europe and the Inquisition. Now he offers a collection (published in Italy in 1998) of nine essays that simultaneously explore history and historical pursuit, contingent as the latter is on temporal (and thereby emotional) perspective. Ginzburg, who teaches at UCLA and the University of Bologna, writes, "[F]amiliarity, which is in the last analysis bound up with cultural belonging, cannot be a criterion of what is relevant." Such expansiveness infuses his reflections on everything from the artistic device of defamiliarization ("for revitalizing our perceptions"), to different religious practices ("both the Greek reflection on myth and the Jewish prohibition of idolatry are instruments of distantiation"), to "the ambiguity of the relationship between Jews and Christians, in which closeness and distance have interlaced... for two millennia." Ginzburg masterfully incorporates ideas and passages from Tacitus and the Bible, as well as Proust, the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, Hume and Paul Valéry. Twenty-six illustrations, ranging from a carving on a Roman sarcophagus to Magritte's painting of a pipe, are used to explicate complicated ideas and passages. The reader should be forewarned: Ginzburg's scholarship is dazzling and profound. From Plato to Alan Sokal, he traverses time and space, sometimes leaving readers bewildered, awed or breathless. General readers will find Ginzburg's essays well worth their rigorous attention; historians will marvel at his skill. (Aug.)