Modern poetry's most dauntingly impersonal, critically depersonalized figure gets a ``life''—his first in 50 years— that's respectful yet honest, original in findings and interpretations. Millan (French Studies/Univ. of Strathclyde, Glasgow), editor of Flammarion's critical edition of MallarmÇ's works, traces his subject's literary evolution in tandem with the early loss of his mother and sister, and his refusal to join the family line of comfortable civil servants. Millan also describes the consequences of the poet's ensuing relegation to lycÇe-level English teaching: endless penury aggravated by his extravagances; years of provincial exile; school authorities' harassment, even after transfer to Paris, for his appearance in avant-garde publications as well as chronic classroom ineptitude. If Millan's portrait of the young poet shows him to be at times ``incredibly unfeeling'' and flawed by self-pity, ``blind prejudice and downright snobbery,'' the mature MallarmÇ, who died at 56 in 1898, emerges as a devoted father, husband, friend—and, of course, artist. Millan provocatively suggests a temperament ``fundamentally lyrical'' and not by nature intellectually disciplined, as MallarmÇ's remarks on resisting his innate ``gushing exuberance'' confirm. The poet's love of sonorous effect ultimately served to chart a fated discrepancy between sound and sense that reflected far broader disharmony between aspiration and limitation—a discovery of ``Nothingness'' (MallarmÇ's word) whose only refutation is ``the Glory of the potential and the inventiveness of the human spirit.'' For Millan, the poet's language captures ``the quintessential, perpetually vanishing, haunting yet ultimately untranslatable quality of life itself,'' a point he illustrates by quoting shorter poems (accompanied by his own incisive translations). Some will wish for more emphasis on larger projects like HÇrodiade, yet certain sonnets resonate here with new associations that are biographically derived but not merely biographical. A clear but by no means simplified portrait of a fundamental modern author. (b&w photos)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-27707-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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