It’s no U and I, but it has its moments.
Literary criticism, at least of a kind, meets literary memoir in this airy essay by novelist Holdefer (Dick Cheney in Shorts, 2017, etc.).
“It’s an eyewitness account of how one writer found sustenance in another writer.” Thus the author’s précis of this slender book, a volume in a series devoted to the influence a particular volume has had on some other writer. George Saunders, of Lincoln in the Bardo fame, has been late coming to renown. As Holdefer notes, he was 58 years old when he published his first novel, though eight books of short stories preceded it, and his working-class background and training as an engineer set him apart from the “yappy kennel of middle-class English majors” who, at least by Holdefer’s reckoning, constitute the bulk of American literary writers. Holdefer, himself a working-class Midwesterner, has some grudging feelings about all that as well as about the indifference that has greeted some of his own writings. He wanders back and forth between his own work and experiences, a life measured out in bangings on the typewriter (back in the days before computers) and table scraps, and Saunders’ book of stories Pastoralia, which Holdefer concludes is quite dystopian. Some of the author’s thoughts are obvious and mannered: “Anyone who frequently refers to Isaac Babel in interviews is not (or is not only) a ‘regular guy’ ” is a bit much, as is the shopworn apercu, “the short story form requires no apology.” Still, when Holdefer hits the mark, it’s worth the wait, as when he discusses how Saunders manages to craft believable characters at least in part by allowing them to do stupid things without de facto making them stupid. In the end, though, it’s mostly a book by which to learn about Holdefer, not about Saunders—not a bad thing, necessarily, but of rather narrow appeal.
It’s no U and I, but it has its moments.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63246-063-9
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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