An ideal introduction to the life and work of an exceptional artist.
A memoir from one of Europe’s most original and accomplished writers.
German writer Erpenbeck has published a number of works of fiction, many garnering distinguished prizes and awards. In her first book of nonfiction, which she calls “a collection of texts,” she is “looking back for the first time at many years of my life, at the thoughts that filled my life from day to day during that time.” These essays, lectures, and speeches are organized in three parts: “Life,” “Literature and Music,” and “Society.” In the first, the author recounts her early years growing up in East Berlin, when she saw “soldiers on patrol” and the “barricades, the watchtowers, and the wall.” When she moved to another apartment, she could “read the time for my socialist life from this clock in the other world.” After the wall fell, she writes, “my childhood belonged in a museum.” In the second section, Erpenbeck begins with her literary models, especially fairy tales, which featured transformations that “expanded my reality like a drug.” She also discusses Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Edgar Lee Masters, whose taciturn poems made her “want to use language primarily to give shape to the gaps between the words, those mute spaces.” In Spoon River Anthology, she writes, the “pauses are part of the text, they may be the finest part.” In this essay and one on her book The Old Child, Erpenbeck is revealing about her unique literary style: elliptical, restrained, unvarnished, and austere. In her exploration of her play Cats Have Nine Lives, she explains how writing plays taught her to excise unnecessary words: “Silence is essential, it is the inseparable shadow of what is spoken.” In the last section, Erpenbeck the activist is front and center. “Blind Spots,” a keynote speech, powerfully addresses borders, refugees from “shitholes,” and the “concept of freedom.”
An ideal introduction to the life and work of an exceptional artist.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2932-6
Page Count: 212
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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