A previously suppressed portion (1932-34) of Nin's near- endless diaries that's shocking for its boundless narcissism, preciousness, and grandiosity—especially when Nin swoons over her sexual affair with her father or describes a late-term abortion. Unexpurgation, in this case, overwhelms the famous, liberated love scenes with Henry Miller and June, making Nin seem paltry and pitiable because she is so blindly self-absorbed. ``A marvelous story,'' Henry Miller writes to Nin in these pages—``but a bad diary.'' Sprinkled throughout these dreamlike fragments are the names of fascinating lovers: Henry and June, of course; Nin's long- suffering husband, Hugh; French poet and dramatist Antonin Artaud; and Otto Rank (Nin's analyst as well as her lover, who warns her that diaries are her opium habit, unlikely to lead to enlightenment). But Nin's prose is muddled and sketchy, always circling back to her moods and qualities and neuroses, never touching down long enough to give the reader a sense of place: ``I leap like a squirrel about Paris, laughing at astrological predictions.'' Indeed, Nin leaps from bed to bed, always ending up with Henry. But external events, even the Great Depression, concern her only as they advance or limit her own enjoyment. In a rare moment of unadorned candor, she admits ``that there is a deformity in my vision which no intelligence can cure.'' This is never more apparent than when she describes her sexual affair with her father, her ``double'' or ``male half'': ``Is this love of my double that self-love again?'' Most readers will answer with a resounding ``yes.'' Though it will probably generate some prurient interest, in the end this is an overheated muddle of thoughts and notes about a black hole of self-absorption.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-144366-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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