Spark’s haughty disdain is evident in many essays, but Jardine’s judicious selections offer glimpses, as well, of a softer,...
An autobiography in essays from an esteemed Scottish writer.
Spark (1918–2006) was a poet, essayist, literary critic and biographer, as well as a fiction writer who won acclaim for such novels as Memento Mori (1959) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Artist Penelope Jardine, Spark’s longtime companion and literary executor, has collected 63 pieces of nonfiction, including book reviews, travel essays, literary reflections and memoirs, that together offer a prismatic portrait. Known for her sharp wit and sarcasm, Spark reveals a tender side in her reminiscences of a visit with the aged poet John Masefield, whose modesty and kindness left her “with a feeling of unexpected warmth”; and her drink with Dame Edith Sitwell, “impressively grand, quite eccentric,” who “had no doubt whatsoever of what the artist in literature was about. High priests and priestesses: that’s what we all were.” From the time she started her writing career as a poet, Spark thought of herself as an artist and wanted to be recognized as one. Writing, she said, was “a sort of obsession…and the hours I spend writing my novels or stories are perhaps the happiest hours of my life.” Among her literary essays, several focus on Mary Shelley, about whom Spark wrote a biography; fellow Edinburgh native Robert Louis Stevenson; and Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights: “terrible, a real Prince of Darkness. He is not only the villain, he is the hero of the book in the grand Homeric sense.” A section on faith—the half-Jewish Spark became a Roman Catholic—features two pieces on the book of Job, “surely one of the loveliest, most intricate and most ambiguous books of the Bible,” which inspired her novel The Only Problem (1984).
Spark’s haughty disdain is evident in many essays, but Jardine’s judicious selections offer glimpses, as well, of a softer, gentler writer.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2159-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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
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