Anyone who loves Hugo, France, and the French language will revel in this delightful book that explains all the intimacies...
A renowned French translator explores the life and legacy of Les Misérables.
The best translators must find just the right meaning, and Bellos (French and Comparative Literature/Princeton Univ.; Is that a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, 2011, etc.) certainly understands that; he is also a crisp stylist capable of seizing the readers’ attention and holding it effortlessly. The story of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece is much more than an account of creativity. His work began as Les Misères, indicating the poor, but the story goes far beyond just those in financial poverty, encompassing the poor in spirit, the wicked, those in distress, and the mauvais pauvre, aka the “bad poor,” who were full of resentment and contempt. The novel is an indictment of three of the biggest problems of the 19th century: limited civil rights, the debasement of women, and a lack of education for children. The story itself and especially its characters grew and developed as names and dates changed, but the character of Marius always reflected Hugo’s life. Bellos opens our eyes to many fascinating elements of the book and its milieu: the depth and complexity of all aspects of French life; the differences between the rich and poor, even down to different terms for money; and Jean Valjean’s embodiment of “the potential that the poorest and most wretched have to become worthy citizens…[that] moral progress is possible for all, in every social sphere.” Particularly astute is the author’s observation that Les Misérables “is not a reassuring tale of the triumph of good over evil, but a demonstration of how hard it is to be good.” With the arrival of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire, Hugo was banished, first to Brussels and eventually, in 1855, to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. It was there that he finished the 1,500-page masterpiece we know today.
Anyone who loves Hugo, France, and the French language will revel in this delightful book that explains all the intimacies of 19th-century French life.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-22323-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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