The deceptively effortless translation by Stein renders this a treasure at once absurd and heartbreaking.
A skillful blurring of art and reality is achieved in French author Bouillier’s beguilingly spare “account” of recovery from a romantic heartbreak.
A sudden call from a lover who left him abruptly years before lurches the narrator of this fiction-cum-memoir from a state of cold paralysis into preparation for battle. The vanished girlfriend resurfaces to invite the narrator to the birthday party of her husband’s best friend, artist Sophie Calle, who always invites a “mystery guest” to represent the year to come, and which the narrator has been designated. This blast from the past strikes the still emotionally raw narrator, caught napping and vulnerable in the afternoon, as a way to finally “cut the leash” that tied him to the former girlfriend’s inexplicable vanishing—and achieve at last a sense of redemption. The weeks before the big night plunge the narrator back into the hellish despair of having to think about the former lover constantly, conveyed in self-aggrandizing, hilarious reflections on matters such as the ridiculous turtlenecks he has taken to wearing as a kind of Band-Aid. He obsesses over signs of fate, coincidences, “a force seeking some means of self-expression,” such as the orbiting of the Ulysses space probe, in order to make sense of the former girlfriend’s reappearance in his life. Determined not to be the laughingstock of the party, he decides on the perfect gift to bring: a bottle of vintage Margaux well beyond his means. And on the night of Reckoning, when he nervously, warily presents himself, his now-married and very lovely former girlfriend informs him that the hostess, Sophie, never opens her presents, rather she displays them. In fact, meeting the girlfriend again does not elucidate anything for the narrator except in her whispered parting words about the bouquet of cut roses—straight from Mrs. Dalloway—which then lifts his battered heart into the divine, redemptive realm of literature.
The deceptively effortless translation by Stein renders this a treasure at once absurd and heartbreaking.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-18570-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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