A modest, gracefully written meditation on creativity and craft.
A close look at writers’ crucial choices.
The latest contributor to The Art of series, novelist and Guggenheim Fellow Castellani (MFA Program/Warren Wilson Coll.; All This Talk of Love, 2013, etc.), offers an attentive reading of works by E.M. Forster, Lorrie Moore, Zoe Heller, Grace Paley, and Tayeb Salih, among others, to illuminate “the how and why” of narration. “There’s no shortage of excellent writing advice,” he observes; but rather than add to those instruction manuals, he investigates the writer’s imagination and process of searching for the “shape and voice” of a story. “Narration,” he writes, “is perspective in action,” revealing “the unique stamp of the narrator’s sensibility and his motley set of biases and agendas at the moment of telling.” The narrator “occupies the most powerful position,” claiming responsibility for a story and influencing “how the work will be read and enjoyed.” Castellani explains and provides examples of many narrative strategies, including free indirect narration (preferred by Forster), where the narrator “fuses with various characters one at a time”; second person—the intimate “you”—deftly handled in Moore’s early collection, Self-Help; and the currently trendy prismatic narration, where a story is told from the perspectives of several characters—a popular approach, Castellani believes, for writers uncomfortable with “the responsibility of exerting moral pressure, of formulating a broad social vision that might exclude entire swaths of readers.” An author who perpetuates a single perspective or reinforces a stereotype risks closing down the possibilities and complexities of fiction. In his own stories, Castellani hopes to “shine a light into the dusty corners of human experience, to resist the most accessible images, to make the specific universal and the universal specific; in short, to honor the power that perspective grants us.”
A modest, gracefully written meditation on creativity and craft.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55597-726-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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