New and longtime Cronenberg fans will devour this intelligent, earnest, and comprehensive tribute.
This collection of essays, interviews, and short fiction explores the provocative themes and undeniable impact of a cult filmmaker.
David Cronenberg enthusiasts place his more popular movies, from Videodrome to The Fly, in the “body horror” subgenre. They’re perhaps best remembered for scenes of deliriously grotesque and fleshy metamorphoses. But this book’s editors, Kelso and Rice, spotlight seven early works from the Canadian writer/director—shorts, feature films, and episodes of TV anthology series from the 1960s and ’70s. A variety of contributors examine Cronenberg-ian themes, like “aberrant sexuality” and horror coming from within (without a tangible “external threat”), which run throughout the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Even without the visceral imagery, readers will easily see his distinctive tone and the abstract concepts he expresses physically (for example, telepaths in the film Stereo reaching elevated states of consciousness via “sexual experimentation”). Not surprisingly, linking so many of Cronenberg’s movies sparks many analyses of his later filmography as well, especially throughout the ’80s and ’90s. While much of the text dissects cinematic themes, the volume does touch on the auteur’s intriguing background as he began working in a subgenre that was relatively unknown in his home country. Elsewhere in this collection, writers deliver short fiction inspired by Cronenberg’s legacy or his early work. Matthew M. Bartlett’s “The Lie Chair,” for example, adapts a 1976 TV episode but adds a clever twist. Notwithstanding a potpourri of voices, the fictional stories boast a Cronenberg-ian flair. In Elle Nash’s incisive “artGOD,” she writes: “My toes graze the revolting flesh. / Her fist is a veiny organ.” The editors round out their book with illustrations by various artists as well as interviews with other filmmakers, novelists who have collaborated with Cronenberg, and the director himself, who’s as intriguing and indelible as the movies he’s bestowed upon the world.
New and longtime Cronenberg fans will devour this intelligent, earnest, and comprehensive tribute.Pub Date: June 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-948687-57-7
Page Count: 358
Publisher: 11:11 Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An unassuming work of literary theory that will dazzle hungry scholars.
A shimmering and perplexing work that challenges the constraints of traditional prose.
In her finely tempered collection of essays and experimental writing, Dutton, author of Margaret the First, explores a conceptual take on storytelling involving the ineffable feeling of a text, beyond mere words. Her work is highbrow while remaining mischievously playful, reminiscent of the form-smashing thrills of writers like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson. The first section, “Prairie,” features five abstract stories that eschew plot in favor of hazy, memoir-like fragments. The poetic and peculiar “Dresses” is an artfully arranged list of excerpts from poems and novels that include mentions of a dress. Despite the content coming from outside sources, their collaged curation transforms the texts into something unsuspectingly resonant. The revelatory essay in “Art” helps unlock Dutton’s puzzles. Here, she discusses contemporary art and the practice of ekphrastic writing, a technique that not only describes visual art in words but also aims to render in language and tone how a work makes a person feel. The author explains her interest in writing a text that can expand beyond its edges and open “a space within which we attend to the world.” “How might a story embody a specific way of looking?” she asks. “Other” further develops these ideas. In the short narrative “Not Writing,” Dutton briefly discusses the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin and how scholar Olivia Laing noted “they aren’t meant to be read, but are there to be responded to.” Dutton asks, “Is it wrong to want to write towards what isn’t intended to be read? What I want is a story that’s an object that can turn itself inside out.” The author not only introduces big ideas; she shows her readers how to grapple with her lofty questions.
An unassuming work of literary theory that will dazzle hungry scholars.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781566897037
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
It's high spirited reading.
When Françoise Gilot, an aspiring young painter, met Pablo Picasso in May, 1943, she was twenty-one years old, he some forty years her senior.
As they grew together, setting about their mutual campaigns upon each other, she proved herself a worthy adversary rather than acolyte. In the ten years which she shared with him, undertaking to assuage his solitude, bearing him two children, meeting his friend and admirers, she maintained a cool comprehension along with her compassion for Picasso the man that shows to delightful advantage here. For Françoise Gilot has the capacity to reveal the man in his intimate and professional dealings, and Picasso is superlative, inimitable copy. Witness Picasso dangling his agents, foremost among them Kahnweller, fancing with his friends Braque and Matisse, playing cat and mouse with the women in his life -- wife Olga, Marie Therese Walter, Dora Marr, Françoise and her successor Jacqueline Roque. But the author has the capacity as well to show Picasso the artist: she quotes him on painting, describes his method of work in painting, sculpture, pottery. Picasso himself is so articulate that he defies other description; au fond, art and the artist are subversive. His re-marks on art include not only his own but that of his foremost colleagues, Matisse and Braque, Miro, Legor, Chagall...All his encounters here are formed by his own formidable temperament, and recalled in satisfying detail by the woman who shared them. An intimate, vivid, above all intelligent and authentic portrait of Picasso, with its twin elements of love and art, this should sell like mad. And rightly.
It's high spirited reading.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781681373195
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964
BOOK REVIEW
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