Sympathetic, perfectly tuned biography of France's most word- wild, controversial novelist ever, whose sins put Zola and Genet in the shade; by French CÇline-scholar Vitoux, and superbly translated by Browner. According to Vitoux, only three of CÇline's novels are now available in English: Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, and Guignol's Band. CÇline (1894-1961) was a towering stylist who invented his own gutter argot. He wrote...fulminated!...blew his guts into your face!...with three little dots...smashing all grammar!...no subjects! stinking predicates!...a rich black delirium of Shakespearean belches!- -though in Journey, his first foulmouthed masterpiece, he'd not yet invented the three dots. Born to the petite bourgeoisie as Louis- Ferdinand Destouches, he suffered poor health most of his life, wrote scathingly of the stifling, gaslit Paris passageway in which he spent his youth, created a monster of his father (really a rather nice guy), was wounded in WW I, reeled from headaches and hallucinations and ever after complained of a train passing by in his left ear. CÇline, a doctor, traveled (or fled) greatly, always visiting health clinics wherever he went, especially in the US: A visit to the Ford auto plant in Dearborn produced a chapter of bilious satire in Journey. When that novel was published, Vitoux tells us, France swooned with joy and horror, and Death on the Installment Plan brought such geysers of outrage that CÇline became a paranoid victim of persecution mania and wrote two filthy anti- Semitic tracts, for which he was vilified for the rest of his life and which helped land him in prison for a year in postwar Denmark. He died having finished a horrific trilogy about WW II; its central novel, North, is now a classic. Vitoux makes few excuses for CÇline but does show that his anti-Semitism was both a mania and a literary artifice. Strong stuff.
Pub Date: April 29, 1992
ISBN: 1-55778-255-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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