by Carol Bergman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 29, 2006
Ardent stories of female self-empowerment from all corners of the art world.
Five captivating tales of women as both artist and muse.
An accomplished journalist (Another Day in Paradise: International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories, 2003), short-story writer, memoirist (Searching for Fritzi, 1999), biographer and NYU writing instructor, Bergman is no stranger to capturing the unique alchemy that makes a character come to life. Here, she collects stories depicting strong women coming into their own, whether as artists—King Tut’s mother Tia, Maria Izquierdo—or in their relation to famous male painters of their day—Gustav Klimt, Marc Chagall, John Singer Sargent. With the exception of "When I See Her,” set in ancient Egypt, these refreshingly feminist tales explore challenges faced by late-19th and early-20th-century women attempting to break from the persistent Victorian role as "Angel in the House.” The title story follows the trapped life of the beautiful Anna Glass, whose husband offers her favors to Emperor Franz Joseph; Glass decides to sit for the philandering emperor’s great rival Klimt in hopes of turning the emperor’s attentions away from her by seducing the artist, but much strife ensues in this tragic tale from war-torn Austria. "Lovers in Blue & Green” traces friendship against all odds, in the story of Marc Chagall and his wife’s move from Russia to Paris to New York as they and their Jewish friends flee Nazi-ravaged Europe. The worlds of art and politics also collide in “Three Women,” in which Maria Izquierdo recalls the hard-won artistic triumphs of her Mexican triumvirate with Lola Ãlvarez Bravo and Frida Kahlo, here movingly described in her last days as “translucent, she was a bulb shining through a shade.” The most fully developed story, "In Full Sail,” places Victorian conventions squarely on the block, when a budding artist who befriends Sargent must acknowledge and embrace her own values as she encounters both his homosexuality and the shifting topography of the modernist art scene.
Ardent stories of female self-empowerment from all corners of the art world.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-40382-0
Page Count: 162
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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