A resplendent collection from a writer who never disappoints.
Urbane essays in pursuit of a self.
Reprising themes he explored in his most recent collection of nonfiction, Alibis (2011), novelist, memoirist, and cultural critic Aciman, at 70, offers elegant meditations on time and memory, longing and desire, being and becoming. Whether writing about his childhood in Alexandria, visiting Rome with Freud’s ghostly presence, searching for Dostoevsky’s 19th-century milieu in St. Petersburg, reading Proust, or watching Éric Rohmer’s movies, Aciman finds himself “caught between remembrance and anticipated memory.” The feeling is a swirl of moods he calls “irrealist,” where “boundaries between what is and what isn’t, between what happened and what won’t,” disappear, and where “what might never, couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t possibly occur” may well happen. Nostalgia imbues many essays with ruefulness, if not regret. In Rome, he discovered “the birthplace of a self I wished to be one day and should have been but never was and left behind and didn’t do a thing to nurse back to life again.” All of us, he writes, “seek a life that exists elsewhere in time, or elsewhere on-screen, and that, not being able to find it, we have all learned to make do with what life throws our way.” Past and present, for him, are “continuously coincident,” and memories that have apparently vanished continue to exert their presence. Those memories include encounters with works of art—John Sloan’s portraits of New York in the 1920s, Monet’s Poppy Field, the “muted lyricism” of Corot’s French landscapes—that hover enticingly in his imagination. Art, writes Aciman, “sees footprints, not feet, luster, not light, hears resonance, not sound. Art is about our love of things when we know it’s not the things themselves we love.” Reminiscent of the writings of W.G. Sebald and Fernando Pessoa (both subjects of his essays), Aciman’s latest conveys with grace and insight his longing to apprehend “myself looking out to the self I am today.”
A resplendent collection from a writer who never disappoints.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-17187-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Lg. Prt. 0-375-70288-1 This first nonfiction outing from singer/songwriter Buffett (Where Is Joe Merchant?, 1992, etc.) is more food for his Parrothead fans, but there is some fine writing along with the self-revelation. Half autobiography and half travelogue, this volume recounts a trip by Buffett and his family to the Caribbean over one Christmas holiday to celebrate the writer’s 50th birthday. Buffett is a licensed pilot, and his personal weakness is for seaplanes, so it’s primarily in this sort of craft that the family’s journey takes place. While giving beautiful descriptions of the locales to which he travels (including a very attractive portrait of Key West, from which he sets out), Buffett intersperses recollections of his first, short-lived marriage, his experiences in college and avoiding the Vietnam draft, and his brief employment at Billboard magazine’s Nashville bureau before becoming a professional musician. In the meantime, he carries his reader seamlessly through the Cayman Island, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Amazon basin, and Trinidad and Tobago. Buffett shows that he is a keen observer of Latin American culture and also that he can “pass” in these surroundings when he needs to. It’s perhaps on this latter point that this book finds its principal weakness. Buffett tends toward preachiness in addressing his mostly landlubber readers, as when he decries the seeming American inability to learn a second language while most Caribbeans can speak English; elsewhere he attacks “ugly Americans out there making it harder for us more-connected-to-the-local-culture types.” On the other hand, he seems right on the money when he observes that the drug war of the 1980s did little to stop trafficking in the area and that turning wetlands into helicopter pads for drug agents isn’t going to offer any additional help. Both Parrotheads and those with a taste for the Caribbean find something for their palates here. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43527-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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