For fans.
Literary odds and ends from the controversial French writer.
This brief collection of eight essays by Genet (1910-1986) were written from 1949 to 1958. All are deeply infused with his sexuality, philosophy, and bizarre, metaphysical writing style. In a footnote to one of them, he writes, “with my cold chisel, words, detached from language, neat blocks, are also tombs.” The titular essay, from 1948, was originally written for radio broadcast but was never recorded. Genet was then facing a prison term, and the station wanted to avoid a scandal that his “deliberately provocative rhetoric” would have caused. Drawing on his experiences as a criminal child incarcerated in Mettray, a correctional facility, Genet proclaims his “love for these ruthless little kids” and his disdain for the society that punishes them: “I want to insult yet again the insulters.” “Adame Miroir” is a short, surrealist ballet/screenplay “for the Grand-Guignol.” In “Letter to Lenor Fini,” Genet writes to a female painter with whom he worked. In a style exuberant in image and metaphor, he describes works “voluptuous and sprinkled with arsenic.” They “seem to me comparable to the complex architecture of swamp odors.” And that is a compliment! An admiring piece on Jean Cocteau praises the “goodness” of his heart. His work “lets anguish be discovered in the fissures.” A lengthy, dazzling piece on Alberto Giacometti, which is part interview and part critique, reads like a magazine profile. In his work, Genet sees “sculptures standing up in their bones” with a “strange power to penetrate that realm of death.” The final piece, sensitive and erotic, is “The Tightrope Walker,” about Abdallah Bentaga, whom Genet was emotionally attached to. The author waxes lovingly euphoric about the performer’s artistry on the wire and the “bulge accentuated in your bodysuit, where your balls are enclosed.” An introduction with biographical and historical contexts would have been helpful.
For fans.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-361-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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