A wise, astute, and luminous literary commonplace book.
Self-portrait of a prizewinning poet in search of himself in entrancing Paris.
“In part, I come to Paris because I am a dreamer. It is a place where I am able to escape the shadows,” writes Cole (Literature/Claremont McKenna Coll.; Nothing to Declare: Poems, 2015, etc.) in this delicate, affectionate, and reflective memoir. Originally serialized in the New Yorker, the book’s 17 parts are mini-essays exploring the Paris landscape, family, friends, films, being gay, and the art of poetry. One of the many questions the author poses throughout the book is, “why am I writing all this down, dear reader?” He answers, “I don’t want to conceal anything, or be surreptitious. Instead, I want to reveal something…that might otherwise remain dormant behind the intense beauty of Paris.” Cole visited a number of graves, including Baudelaire’s and his very good friend James Lord’s. While visiting Susan Sontag’s in Montparnasse, Cole describes himself as a “literary tourist….Cemeteries, after all, are for the living.” Stylistically, the book has a strong aphoristic feel to it. The text, a “landscape self-portrait,” is quietly understated in its reflections. Not surprisingly, at the heart of the book is poetry, Cole’s own and that of others, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens. I want my poems to seem rebellious…definite, self-sufficient,” he writes, “and true in what they represent, like expressionist paintings.” When “so much American poetry feels emotionally tepid and almost suburban,” Cole revels in the “organized violence” of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, which “extended the boundaries of the lyric.” For Cole, Paris is the “city of the beloved. Some say a man goes mad if he is without love.” The book’s ending, with its series of sentences all beginning with “J’aime,” is exuberant, Whitmanesque, Orphic: “and in this place, I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew.”
A wise, astute, and luminous literary commonplace book.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-218-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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