Sly, quite witty, and very smart: an elegant meditation on the precincts of Art and Life, embodied in that great polar-bear of these two antipodes—Flaubert. English critic and novelist Barnes (Metroland) gives over the narration of this playful but quite serious literary investigation to a fictional retired doctor, Geoffrey Braithwait, an amateur Flaubert scholar whose wife (sporadically unfaithful to him in the past) has recently committed suicide. (This murmurous subtext flickers like a compass point beneath all the discussion of Flaubert's bachelorhood and misanthropy.) Braithwait is a dazzling, easy-going, discriminating guide—whether tracking down the stuffed parrot Flaubert kept on his desk or giving poor maligned Louise Colet (F.'s mistress) a rebuttal opportunity, whether discussing friends. . . or the place of trains in Flaubert's life. As criticism of criticism, too, the novel is deliciously sane and supple, especially when skewering critics from Sartre to Enid Starkie—who complained that the color of Emma Bovary's eyes changes on different pages of the novel. ("Eyes of brown, eyes of blue. Does it matter? Not, does it matter if the writer contradicts himself; but does it matter what colour they are anyway? I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided on inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.") And Braithwait's tangential dictates against fashion in fiction will delight anyone who knows the territory: "A quota system is to be introduced on fiction set in South America. The intention is to curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony. Ah, the propinquity of cheap life and expensive principles, of religion and banditry, of surprising honor and random cruelty." Indeed, Braithwait/Barnes is continuously entertaining and telling—as he acidly dismisses some of the many stupid "accepted ideas" about Flaubert, as he drily satirizes literary obtuseness in its assorted flavors. So—for connoisseurs of Flaubert or of fiction generally: an economical, balanced, gliding defense of the artist and his art—cast in an oddly undefinable form that's very special but never precious.
Pub Date: March 8, 1984
ISBN: 0679731369
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1984
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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