An engrossing, vivid inquiry into a man and his magisterial creation.
The story behind one of the world’s most unique buildings.
The bold opening sentence of art historian van Hensbergen’s (Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-century Icon, 2004, etc.) intoxicating book about one of the world’s most “puzzling” and “quixotic” structures instantly engages: “Gaudí, possibly more than any other architect in history, has been totally misunderstood.” The author writes that Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926), like his buildings, was often seen as “far too eccentric, too bizarre and in Catalonia—the land of Salvador Dalí—almost too obviously surrealist and actually downright strange.” To understand the method behind his architectural madness and his iconic Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family, it’s necessary to understand Gaudí’s profound Catholic faith. Van Hensbergen takes us on a tour of the building, pointing out its unique and distinctive features, from the roof’s complex vaulting, like an “inverted egg box,” to Gaudí’s invention of the centenary arch, which miraculously holds up the roof without buttressing via inverted chainlike links. When finished, 18 towers will “crowd together and push up in unison like a family in stone.” Gaudí drew on nature—snake skeletons, springtime shoots, and the gnarls and knots on oak trees—revealed through “the omnipresence of God’s guiding hand”—to fashion the ornaments. They “had to speak.” The idea for the basilica came from Joseph Maria Bocabella, a small-time Barcelona religious bookseller. Gaudí took over the commission in 1883 shortly after the first architect was let go. He finished the crypt in 1889, but his “next decision almost defies logic.” He decided to focus on just one facade, meaning that he “would only ever see a fraction of the entire building finished within his own lifetime.” They hope to finish the basilica by 2026, the 100th anniversary of Gaudí’s death. Van Hensbergen’s rich, poetic prose is perfectly suited to describe this unprecedented work of art.
An engrossing, vivid inquiry into a man and his magisterial creation.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-781-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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