A playful illumination of the complexities, mysteries and absurdities of an obscure French organization devoted to “potential literature.”
Serious wordplay abounds within the experiments of the Oulipo, a Paris-based collective devoted to systematic literary exploration, constraints that free the mind and imagination (such as writing a novel without using the letter e), and devising “real solutions to imaginary problems.” The organization’s pantheon includes Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, while fellow travelers could range from Vladimir Nabokov to Paul Auster. Much of the writing focuses on the processes of writing and reading while an emphasis on language as language trumps such conventional notions of “realism” in character and plot. Words on a page may not be more, but they are never less, than words on a page. American author Becker served an apprenticeship as an archivist before joining the organization in which “anyone who asks to be a member of the Oulipo thereupon becomes inadmissible for life.” The author is also the reviews editor for The Believer, and his self-deprecating reminiscences humanize the book well beyond literary theory, while his tone renders even extended examinations of the organization’s theories and history more palatable than expected. One work is praised for the “Zen-by-way-of-Kafka simplicity of its zero-sum goal,” while the masters rise above mere experimentation: “Like Perec, Calvino was great at bringing humanity into what could otherwise be a soulless structural shell game.” There is a strong mathematical, even scientific, component within the philosophies of these theorist-practitioners, whose field of inquiry (like so much else) has been transformed by computer technology. But there’s also a disarming element of whimsy: “Like any literary treatises worth their salt, the manifestos are unsatisfying; their saving grace is [their]…tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the notion of the manifesto in the first place.” Destined to delight a small, select readership—the Oulipo wouldn’t have it any other way.
Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-674-06577-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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
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
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