Hilarious collection of letters by the Russian-American maestro that must rank as one of the most contentious and eccentric of all time. While there are no hefty literary gems here—Nabokov's letters tend to be small, albeit glittery with intelligence, gleaming with style—fans of perverse masterpieces like Lolita and Ada won't be disappointed. Nabokov loved to duel, frolic, and tease. Consider his evaluations of Dr. Zhivago ("that trashy, melodramatic, false and inept book") and Robert Lowell ("l do not mind Robert Lowell's disliking my books, but I wish he would stop mutilating his betters—Mandelshtam, Rimbaud, and others. I regret not having entitled my article 'Rhyme and Punishment'"). Or his response when asked what he'd like Neil Armstrong to say on the moon: "I want a lump in his throat to obstruct the wisecrack." Or the jingle he sent in unsolicited to the Burma-Shave company: "He passed two cars; then five; then seven;/and then he beat them all to Heaven." Other letters skirt the edge of his massive war with Edmund Wilson (the main battles don't see print here); detail his run-ins with prudes over the publication of Lolita; trace his triple careers as lepidopterist, novelist, professor. Even his political naivet‚ acquires in hindsight a certain quaint charm, as in this 1965 telegram to an ailing President Johnson: "Wishing you a perfect recovery and a speedy return to the admirable work you are accomplishing." All in all, the portrait emerges of a brilliant, fussy, combative iconoclast who adopted a literary persona (filled with laughter, thank goodness) at an early age and never afterwards dropped his mask. Devilish and baroque. In other words, classic Nabokov.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1989
ISBN: 0156936100
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
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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