Lucid and intelligent, but perhaps a little too low-key.
From National Book Award–winning novelist Tuck (The News from Paraguay, 2004, etc.), a concise biography of the Italian writer whose fiction explored the power of make-believe and the delusions by which people live.
Elsa Morante (1912–85) was unconventional from the moment of her birth—the eldest of four, all fathered by a man not their mother’s husband—to after her death, when a group of friends dug up her cremated remains and took them to be scattered in the waters surrounding the island of Procida, the setting for her beloved 1957 novel, Arturo’s Island. She married fellow novelist Alberto Moravia in 1941 and was still his wife when she died, but they had lived apart for years and had never been faithful, though they remained friends. Desperately poor as a struggling young writer, Morante displayed in her fiction a profound sympathy for the oppressed, the misfit and those disfigured or incapacitated by disease. This attitude would find its most emphatic expression in her 1974 bestseller History, controversial among Italy’s left-leaning intellectuals because the politically unaligned Morante painted such a pessimistic picture of proletarian life and the depredations of power. Fiercely devoted to truth-telling, she could be an uncomfortable person to know, but she was generous and loyal to her friends. (And expected the same; she never spoke again to Pier Paolo Pasolini after he brutally panned History.) She had wild mood swings, but loved pretty clothes, handsome men (she was one of director Luchino Visconti’s many lovers) and good food and conversation. Well-known and respected in Italy, Morante’s work is much more obscure in the English-speaking world, and it’s not quite clear why Tuck chose to write about her. Though the biographer offers appreciations of the individual novels, she never really conveys a coherent picture of Morante’s achievements as a writer. Those content with a vivid evocation of her powerful personality, however, will be satisfied by Tuck’s graceful aperçus.
Lucid and intelligent, but perhaps a little too low-key.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-147256-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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