Often overwrought and ostentatious—like a love letter, which of course it is.
A brash, well-read British novelist contemplates the history of his craft, the nature of artistic influence, the complexities of translation and the literary lint caught in the convolutions of his own (figurative) navel.
In a work that has nearly as many chapters as pages (not to mention its numerous “volumes,” “books,” illustrations, indexes and other flotsam), Thirlwell (Politics, 2003) expands an interesting essay into a tedious tome. He rounds up many of the usual suspects here: Cervantes, Joyce, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hemingway, Kafka, Diderot, Pushkin, Bellow and Proust. Also appearing are some unusual suspects: the French Édouard Dujardin, Italian Italo Svevo, Czech Bohumil Hrabal and Polish Witold Grombrowicz. The author challenges conventional wisdom throughout. Translations do work, he declares, even bad ones; the style can emerge despite inaccuracies and infelicities. Thirlwell can turn an effective phrase of his own now and then. The novel, he avers, is an “international mongrel”; he calls his own effort “a description of a milky way, an aurora borealis.” His scholarship is impressive. He appears to have read about everything worth reading (and lots not-so-worth reading) and to be aware of the various coincidences that make literary history both appealing and puzzling. He shows us Joyce sitting in a Paris lecture by Nabokov; we see the volumes of Diderot on Pushkin’s bookshelves. If Thirlwell finds enormous relevance in small essays published in tiny periodicals, he also has the wisdom not to mistake the ripple on the river for the river itself. He climbs to a high vantage point, shows us the river’s twisting course, the places where it’s overflowed its banks and the distant horizon where it disappears into the unknown.
Often overwrought and ostentatious—like a love letter, which of course it is.Pub Date: April 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-13722-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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