illus., not seen)
A masterful life of the eccentric pioneer who mapped the modern mind in Remembrance of Things Past (more accurately
translated here as In Search of Lost Time), by the noted Proust scholar (French/Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham; The Proustian Quest, not reviewed). In seeking to reveal how one of the century’s towering novelists (1871–1922) "came to produce what is arguably the most brilliant, sustained prose narration in the history of literature," Carter has produced a long, loving annotation to the autobiographical In Search. He explores his subject with a scholar's care, a novelist's eye, and a generous tolerance for readers without French. His hero is invariably ill, most often with asthma, a condition he exacerbates with drugs, a nocturnal lifestyle, and an erratic diet (in his last days he consumes only ice cream and beer; his death follows his adamant refusal to accept medical treatment for pneumonia). Proust's legendary eccentricities are on full display: his cork-lined living quarters (to ensure the quiet he craves), his vampirish avoidance of daylight, his endless revisions of his texts (In Search requires "one of the most demanding productions in the history of publishing"), and his prodigality (he recklessly spends nearly all of his enormous inheritance). Noting the fascination of Proust’s lifestyle for contemporary readers, Carter labors to explain his complicated sexuality (he fights a duel with a reviewer who has suggested he is gay, but he also pursues young men, regarding waiters at the Ritz as a particular delicacy) and is determined to establish that Proust "never attempted to deny his Jewish heritage." Not even Carter's considerable narrative gifts, however, can make Proust's bedridden later years, marked by a contentious, complicated correspondence with his publisher, as compelling as his early, more extroverted life. A prodigious work, rich and racy, informed by fact, animated by imagination, utterly worthy of its wondrous subject. (47
illus., not seen)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08145-6
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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