Despite its claim as the first full-scale literary biography of Virginia Woolf, King's (William Blake, 1991) thick work breaks no new ground, but instead tries lugubriously to make the writer into a self-help heroine and her books into a kind of therapy. From the constrained Stephen household to bohemian Bloomsbury, Woolf's life is readily and voluminously available in her collected letters, diaries, and memoir fragments (as well as in her nephew Quentin Bell's candid authorized biography)including her early sexual abuse by her half-brothers, her mental instability and breakdowns, and the development of her innovative novels and acute criticism. While King doggedly recounts the familiar details, he fixates, pseudo-psychoanalytically, on the conflicts of her character throughout her various relationships with family and friends. The legacy of her emotionally distant mother plays out in her intense female friendships and ambivalent sexuality (as expressed in her affair with Vita Sackville-West); the need to both identify with and separate from her sentimentally tyrannical father leads to competitive skirmishes with T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, and others. On a positive if drab note, her marriage to Leonard Woolf comes across as a source of comforting stability, between the Hogarth Press and his attentions (his frustrations with their sex life apart). If King's amateur Freudian checkup ignores her wit and humor, his Cliff Notes summaries of her work, which digress only for biographic parallels, do not support his vague discussion of Woolf's ``feminist aesthetic'' as opposed to a ``masculine literature,'' Woolf's search for a place as a woman writer and contemporary feminists' debt to her notwithstanding. In interpreting her life as a heroic struggle against her morbid impulses, King ironically portrays Woolf's life and literary achievement with the gloom she sought to overcome. (16 pages b&w photos, illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03748-7
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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