paper 0-8101-1604-9 A Croatian writer intriguingly probes the meaning of the past and its literary rendering through an examination of her own life and that of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Vrkljan’s two works form a cohesive whole that stirs the reader with the heavy atmosphere of Belgrade, Zagreb, and Berlin. The two works also invite us to draw parallels between what Vrkljan has to say about autobiographical writing and our own country’s obsession with memoir literature. The two works contain both the literary representation of the past and the interpretation of what it means to truthfully present the (remembered) facts of one’s life while retaining the lyrical beauty of words. The Silk, the Shears recounts Vrkljan’s life as it spans the tumultuous political upheavals of the century—from her childhood in interwar Belgrade, to her adolescence in Zagreb, and her adult life as a writer in Zagreb and Berlin. For those familiar with the former Yugoslavia, Vrkljan’s writing is piercing, vividly capturing the feel of strained intimate personal relations and public life. Vrkljan writes with honesty and tenderness about her family and friends, about her development as a poet, her own and her mother’s unsatisfactory role as wife, her oppressive father, and the troubles of women in society. Marina picks up on these themes; it reads as an externalized autobiography, an imaginative leap of interpretation through a literary and spiritual soul mate. Reflecting on this connection, Vrkljan writes, “The biographies of others. Splinters in our body. As I pull them out, I pull out my own pictures from the deep, dark funnel.” With the spirit of Tsvetaeva, Vrkljan discusses how a poet can reconstruct the fabric of life. A noteworthy addition to the small body of contemporary Croatian writings available in English, and a lyrical study of the form and meaning of biography.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8101-1603-0
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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