Memoirist, biographer and translator Baxter (Von Sternberg, 2010, etc.) turns his sensuous walking tours of Paris into the written word, with gratifying results.
The author does what he does best—short chapters that explore some engaging nugget of Parisian culture or history, in a pace and voice that are both gentle. Goaded by a friend to put his voluminous knowledge of Paris to use as a walking-tour guide to literary and other artistic haunts, he accepted the challenge and found a calling. Baxter enjoys amusing and being amused, and he has pocketfuls of colorful background stories that create atmosphere. He is of the Henry Miller school—give him the boulevards known for sex and crime, food and drink, the opium dens and the absinthe bars, the art galleries selling salacious photographs—and he pulls it all off with an air of charm and calm. On his tours, the plans are open-ended; he digresses as needs be, perhaps into a story about how the lock to his house broke when he was about to leave for Christmas Eve at his relatives’, or the curious interlude with a performance artist claiming to have known Marlene Dietrich. Readers can feel his elation at being out and about, experiencing the antique weather in the small passageways, cruising down Haussmann’s sidewalks, dropping into cafés famous and obscure and exploring anything Hemingway. He is the flâneur’s flâneur: “Visitors didn’t want their Paris. They wanted mine. Plenty of time when they got home to read Flaubert or a history of the French Revolution. What they wanted now was to reach out and touch the living flesh—to devour and be devoured.” Walking through Paris with Baxter is really what bien-être is all about.
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199854-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in...
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.
When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito’s rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. “I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere,” she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body’s limits and her mind’s boundaries (“I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain”). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author’s writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work.
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90504-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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