In this persuasive intellectual biography, Singal makes sense of Faulkner's thought by viewing him as caught between the cultures of the Victorian and Modernist eras. In the centennial year of Faulkner's birth, Singal (History/Hobart and William Smith Colleges), opens with a subject he calls largely unexplored—"the structure and nature" of Faulkner's thought. Singal believes the key to understanding lies in the ongoing "conflict of cultures" in which Faulkner lived— the morally absolutist Victorianism of his rural gentry youth and the more fluid concepts of the Modernism of his adulthood. After examining the persuasive influence of Faulkner's proper Victorian mother and Civil War hero great-grandfather, Col. William C. Falkner, he turns to the novelist's early encounters with Modernism, beginning with Mosquitoes, with which the writer entered "the darkened rooms and houses of southern history." Analyses of other novels follow, including Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, and The Sound and the Fury, the latter representing Faulkner's "Modernist authorial self" taking hold (though, Singal believes, he never felt entirely at ease with Modernism), notably in the character of Benjy Compson, who repudiates the entire Victorian value system. While the book centers on textual analysis, Singal's forays into Faulkner's life ground the book and reveal the biographer's humanism and restraint. On the fact that Faulkner did not divorce wife Estelle to wed lover Meta Carpenter, Singal indicates an understanding of human connections, observing that "despite mental and sometimes physical warfare, genuine bonds of loyalty and even affection still united the Faulkners, who after all had been tight childhood friends." Singal also chronicles Faulkner's lifelong excessive drinking with a refreshing mix of largesse and scientific fact, admitting the possibility of alcohol's early benefits in liberating Faulkner's artistic inhibitions but detailing the effects of alcohol misuse, giving credence to his claim that alcohol eventually diminished his talents. Written with calm authority and offering a plausible new thesis, this is a worthwhile introduction to the next century of Faulkner.
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1997
ISBN: 0-8078-2355-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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