by David Attwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Recent work receives comparatively short shrift, but Attwell provides a solid foundation for a literary appreciation.
A literary biography illuminating the development of the Nobel Prize–winning author’s work.
Identity is a crucial issue in the writing of Coetzee (The Childhood of Jesus, 2013, etc.), a literary master for whom the central question is not “who I am, as much as…what I am.” He was born in South Africa; he received his doctorate and started his academic career in the United States, from which he was exiled for a political protest; and he has been a naturalized Australian citizen for more than a decade. He writes fiction, nonfiction, and criticism, and his career as an academic has deeply informed his novels. He was a family man, though the wife from whom he was divorced in 1980 figures little in his work or this biography. “Aspects of Coetzee’s life that have little bearing on his authorship have little relevance to this book,” writes Attwell (English/Univ. of York), who was once his subject’s student and has remained a scholar of his work. Complicating the identity question is Coetzee’s “strong desire for self-masking.” He has written a series of memoirs in the third person, as if writing about another character, while in his fiction, he has frequently employed characters with some variation on his name. Rather than serving as an introduction to his work, this book will enrich the understanding of those already well-versed in the literature—it requires close reading of Coetzee, and it rewards it. The study untangles the threads of a creative process that always involves multiple drafts and often finds him juggling multiple projects, with passages put aside only to appear years or decades later in a new work. Though Coetzee is often considered more of a philosophical novelist or novelist of ideas, Attwell shows just how deeply the life and work are intertwined. The author quotes his subject: “All writing is autobiography…[and] all autobiography is storytelling.”
Recent work receives comparatively short shrift, but Attwell provides a solid foundation for a literary appreciation.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42961-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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