An amiable, discursive ramble through the several lives of Canada's octogenarian novelist. ``Sometimes I quake and grow pale, for it looks as if the Twilight Years, when I ought to be growing roses and sucking my dentures in peace, are going to be passed in back-breaking toil,'' once quipped the then 64-year-old author. Davies, born in 1913 in provincial Thamesville, Ontario, and best known as the belaureled author of The Deptford Trilogy and other works of fiction, came into his own relatively late: His literary self began to flourish only in middle age, after disappointments in his career as a playwright. The man of the theater has also been recognized as an accomplished journalist and editor, and was for years an admired professor of drama at the University of Toronto. This leisurely biography by Grant (ed., The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies, 1990, etc.) is based on 70 interviews conducted with Davies over a 12- year period. One of the biography's achievements is to cut a narrative path through an undeniably voluminous literary forest; another is Grant's appraisal of Davies's distinctions as a Jungian and a Canadian cultural avatar. Readers will also savor her stock of anecdotes, released at a relaxed, avuncular pace: We gain views of Davies as a henpecked boy (he still dreams of his mother as a ``Medusa'' who ``turns him to stone''), as a swaggering Oxford dandy, and as the furtive antic who included a capsule portrait of theater critic Clive Barnes in his novel The Lyre of Orpheus. Fellow Canadian Grant is nothing if not sympathetic in her approach; a more critical (and concise) tack would be welcome for a writer who once confessed that ``I sometimes take extreme views on controversial subjects in order to get the goat of campus sorceresses.'' But Davies's many fans will find themselves well sated by the portraiture, the detail, and the richness shared here. (32 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-82557-3
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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