Meandering, intriguing, and maddeningly light on the actual Carnival.
Novelist Danticat (The Farming of the Bones, 1998, etc.) slaps together a pastiche of cultural and political history, walking tour, and memoir focused around Carnival in the Haitian town of Jacmel.
Though she lived on Haiti until she was 12, when she joined her emigrant parents in New York City, Danticat never attended Carnival, having been warned repeatedly by her overprotective guardians about its dangers. Now in her early 30s, she returns to the island, finally ready to embrace the bacchanal. Basing her research in the town of Jacmel, touted locally as “the Riviera of Haiti,” the author interviews Carnival expert Michelet Divers, who sits on the committee charged with deciding who is in and who is out of the parade every year. (This year, Divers says, the mule with tennis shoes, a crowd favorite, is decidedly in.) Danticat wanders around the local cemetery, bushwhacks through banana fields in search of a 200-year-old steam engine, and talks to a local peasant farmer who still lives without electricity. She discusses standard Carnival characters, Carnival-specific games of chance, fireworks, banana fritters, and the contest to select city hall's Carnival queen. Finally, Danticat gets to Carnival day, offering snapshots of customary revelers: “zombies and apes greeting each other, white colonists kissing Arawak Indians, a lion sharing a bottle of juice with a bay alligator, and slaves shaking hands with ghosts and devils.” Interspersed with these traditional characters are those masked as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Che Guevara. Darker notes are struck by a troupe acting out the plight of Haitian boat people encountering the US Coast Guard and a scrawny young man costumed as AIDS, sporting lipstick, blackened teeth, a wig, dress, and white underwear splotched with red.
Meandering, intriguing, and maddeningly light on the actual Carnival.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-60908-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown Journeys
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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