Weinstein’s lengthy exegeses and analyses are not for the casual reader, but those who share his taste for challenging...
The author of A Scream Goes Through the House (2003) again examines what art reveals about our psyches, this time focusing on the novels of four modernist writers and one late-20th-century successor.
“These groundbreaking narratives seek to uncover the actual shape and texture of a life . . . its inside testimony of consciousness,” states Weinstein (Comparative Literature/Brown Univ.) in the preface to his dense, closely argued work of literary criticism. In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, people and even things are seldom what they seem; Proust’s seven-part epic is a “false-bottomed suitcase” that constantly undercuts the narrator’s (and readers’) perceptions to show how subjective our notions of the world are. James Joyce’s Ulysses plays every kind of game with the conventional novel to vividly recreate the complexities of the mind and the insistent demands of the body. In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf enters into her characters’ thoughts to remind us that “the self lives in and through others”; identity is a social relationship for her. William Faulkner’s doomed white Southerners in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom sometimes can’t even distinguish between their inner torment and the brutal physical reality around them. While these writers plumb their characters’ interiors, Toni Morrison blisteringly shows black people so maimed by the horrors of slavery that they fear to explore their memories at all: “the untold, unknown, unshareable personal story . . . has become, in Beloved, lethal.” No brief résumé can do justice to Weinstein’s passionate examination of these seminal works, whose difficulty he acknowledges while persuasively contending that the authors had to break with 19th-century traditions in order to capture the ferment and instability of “life as we live it [without] an omniscient narrator.”
Weinstein’s lengthy exegeses and analyses are not for the casual reader, but those who share his taste for challenging fiction will be moved by his love for books that “both shock and educate us about the scope and intensity of human feeling.”Pub Date: March 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6094-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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