Fractured but elegant musings on dying and, most poignantly, living.
Last words and images from the Nobel Prize–winning writer.
In this posthumous collection, Grass (1927-2015) offers brief, gentle, intimate meditations illustrated by his own soft pencil drawings. Some pieces look back with nostalgia and even surprise at the author’s past. Discovering more than 200 drawings and watercolors that he made when he was an art student, he feels “amazed” and searches his memory “trying to find the young man in his early twenties” who was passionate about craft. He recalls his start as a writer, “setting down words early on,” excited when he received an Olivetti typewriter, “sleek and elegant in form, as if Leonardo da Vinci had invented the typewriter on the side.” Even in the age of computers, Grass remained true to his Olivetti, stocking up on ribbons that became increasingly scarce. In many pieces, the author considers the losses that come with old age: his senses of taste and smell, the pleasures of a woman’s breasts, and teeth, reduced to only one, “single, who wants to show how stalwart he is.” A poem entitled “Self Portrait” begins, “Old codger, chewer of gums / fit for nothing but spooned pap.” Lost, too, was the ability to travel, and Grass was reduced to tracing a finger on a map. “It’s hard to let go,” he writes. “Some things are easier / others give rise to howls of complaint.” He complains, for example, about a world in which some favorite foods are considered offensive—e.g., pig’s kidneys, breaded brains, beef liver. His children exclaim “Sickening!” when he reprises the flavors of his past. Of the few benefits of old age, the lessened need for sleep is one: “sleep,” he remarks, “is a waste of time.” He and his wife decided to have their coffins made, discussing shape, wood, and types of handles with a master carpenter. When the finished products arrived, they had “our trial lie-in,” and then, he writes, “life went on as usual.”
Fractured but elegant musings on dying and, most poignantly, living.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-78538-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
Lg. Prt. 0-375-70288-1 This first nonfiction outing from singer/songwriter Buffett (Where Is Joe Merchant?, 1992, etc.) is more food for his Parrothead fans, but there is some fine writing along with the self-revelation. Half autobiography and half travelogue, this volume recounts a trip by Buffett and his family to the Caribbean over one Christmas holiday to celebrate the writer’s 50th birthday. Buffett is a licensed pilot, and his personal weakness is for seaplanes, so it’s primarily in this sort of craft that the family’s journey takes place. While giving beautiful descriptions of the locales to which he travels (including a very attractive portrait of Key West, from which he sets out), Buffett intersperses recollections of his first, short-lived marriage, his experiences in college and avoiding the Vietnam draft, and his brief employment at Billboard magazine’s Nashville bureau before becoming a professional musician. In the meantime, he carries his reader seamlessly through the Cayman Island, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Amazon basin, and Trinidad and Tobago. Buffett shows that he is a keen observer of Latin American culture and also that he can “pass” in these surroundings when he needs to. It’s perhaps on this latter point that this book finds its principal weakness. Buffett tends toward preachiness in addressing his mostly landlubber readers, as when he decries the seeming American inability to learn a second language while most Caribbeans can speak English; elsewhere he attacks “ugly Americans out there making it harder for us more-connected-to-the-local-culture types.” On the other hand, he seems right on the money when he observes that the drug war of the 1980s did little to stop trafficking in the area and that turning wetlands into helicopter pads for drug agents isn’t going to offer any additional help. Both Parrotheads and those with a taste for the Caribbean find something for their palates here. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43527-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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