Six iridescent essays in lieu of an autobiography. Updike penned these luxurious self-examinations soon after someone informed him of a "repulsive" plan to write his biography. Although the pieces collected here will surely not fend off the multiple Lives to come, they do provide snug, friendly glimpses into the reflective mind of a writer abnormal in his normality (churchgoer, Democrat, cheerful participant at town meetings); they also confirm Updike's status as one of America's foremost literary stylists. In "A Soft Spring Night in Shillington," a tour-de-force of compressed memories, he walks through his Childhood while wandering his hometown streets one rainy night in 1980. "At War with My Skin" documents his lifelong struggle against that silver-scaled beast, psoriasis, and doubles as a celebration of the Puritan enclave of Ipswich, Mass., where he lived for over a decade, became rich and famous, and learned to swim in the "soft, pale-green ocean." "Getting the Words Out" dissects the author's difficulties with speech (he stutters), asthma, claustrophobia, and his redemptive love affair with writing. In "On Not Being a Dove," Updike discusses his ambivalence about the Vietnam War. The least successful essay, "A Letter to My Grandson"—too private to generate general interest—explores the genealogy of the "big, bumptious race" of Updikes. Finally, in "On Being a Self Forever," Updike longs for an afterlife, wonders "Where does the self dawn?" and asserts his lasting conviction that "the self's responsibility. . .is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let's say, the walk back from the mailbox." Self-probings—sometimes facile, sometimes dead-on—of a complex, funny, modest man, framed in glorious prose. A neat masterpiece of literary undressing.
Pub Date: March 18, 1989
ISBN: 044921821X
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1989
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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