Brechneff leavens his account of adventure, simple pleasures and hard work in a magical landscape with interludes from his...
Artist and author Brechneff (Homage: Encounters with the East, 2007) chronicles his 30-year courtship with the Aegean isle of Sifnos, recalling his passages of self-discovery, development as a painter and ambivalence over his island identity.
Punctuated by spare, evocative sketches—seascapes, landscapes, portraits—the book, written with Brechneff’s partner, Lovejoy, is no mere travelogue of an idyllic retreat, but something of a sociological study as well as an examination of sexual confusion and the perils of adopting a persona that becomes a behavioral trap. Brechneff was born in 1950 in the Belgian Congo, the son of a Russian émigré father and a Swiss mother. Feeling like an alien in Switzerland in his teens, he was drawn not only to the romance of island life, but to the prospect of being cut off, freed from the strictures of proper Swiss society in a culture that seemed lodged in another century. On Sifnos, he found limitless inspiration, warmth and hospitality, but also deeply ingrained traditions and habits. Each summer, beginning in 1972, Brechneff basked in the Greek light and reveled in his new skin. Pictures poured out of him, leading to increasing success in London and New York. The author’s alluring narrative combines erotic liaisons with vivid portraits of islanders and visitors, though the sheer number of these encounters and friendships renders them less distinct in the end. He wavers between being unusually self-aware and tiresomely self-absorbed, engaging about his work but preoccupied with sexual longings and conquests, often depicting himself as a caricature of the voracious young omnisexual. Yet his candor is winning, and hard to resist, as we follow his growth from naïve young man to worldly, accomplished adult.
Brechneff leavens his account of adventure, simple pleasures and hard work in a magical landscape with interludes from his life in Europe and America. Yet, happily, the author seldom strays far from his beloved island refuge, even when its enduring entreaty begins to wane.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0374166717
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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