The bad-taste life of a relentless sexual and political rebel and ever-scandalous bad boy of Italian cinema and the arts. Depending on your sexual and artistic likes, this behemoth will be a riveting or overwhelmingly tiresome experience. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) was a loose cannon even among his chosen brotherhood of gays: Though daily he played his homosexuality out to its most dangerous limit, he fought against gay rights, saying that to give gays political strength is to castrate their nonconformity and weaken their need to slap society on its cheek. A Marxist, he upbraided the Communist Party whenever it threatened to conform or to play footsie with the Church. An atheist, he made what may remain the starkest, most truth-seeking life of Christ ever filmed, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. He was, in short, a creature of bitter contradictions and focused on being contradictory and unacceptable. According to first-time author Schwartz, at the heart of the man and the artist lay a white-hot, molten mother-love, returned twofold by Susanna, his mother. Throughout adult life and despite his obsessed nightly search for a complaisant adolescent, Pasolini was ever under his mother's roof. She waited up, and he adored and sanctified her. Having worked up a reputation as a notorious poet/essayist/novelist, he began his film career as a scenarist for Fellini and Bolognini, then graduated to directing. His filmmaking falls into three periods, with a startling turn from antisocial subjects to a trilogy of erotic medieval classics that Pasolini thought the most subversive of his works in that they showed the common summer- warmth lost by sterile present-day society. Encyclopedic, microscopic portrait of a lean and thin-lipped narcissist, murdered by a 17-year-old thug he was paying to service. (Thirty-two pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57744-2
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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