Poetic, graceful, and full of hard-won knowledge.
A luminous memoir of an unusual life in an unlikely place.
Graves, daughter and translator of the famed poet and novelist Robert Graves, spent her early life in Majorca, where her father had installed the family in bohemian exile from England. That their romanticized getaway happened to fall under the dominion of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco seems not to have troubled Graves senior, a nominal socialist, although Lucia gives a terrifying account of her school years, a time when fierce nuns spoke of the generalissimo as if he were Christ restored to earth and instructed their pupils “that the Jews, who hated the Spaniards and were political spies and conspirators, had secret dealings with the Moors and murdered Christian children.” Undaunted, Lucia grew up to be a good cosmopolitan and democrat, keenly appreciative of the many differences that distinguish Catalonia from the Balearic Islands, and both from Castile. (In Catalonian hospitals, she writes, the dominant symbol is not the cross, as it is in Madrid, but an almond-shaped eye, borrowed from ancient Egyptian iconography.) Her portrait of the reemergence of Catalan identity after Franco’s death offers a learned insight into this proud people, while her descriptions of daily life in rural Spain will inspire nostalgia in readers who have traveled there. Those hoping for dirt on the renowned author of I, Claudius will be disappointed, however, for Robert Graves appears only in passing in these pages, a generally benevolent but always distant figure. Instead, Lucia Graves lingers on her own epiphanies as a child, and then as an adult, familiar with many cultures but wholly at home in none, “immersed in a textual world” that takes in all times and peoples.
Poetic, graceful, and full of hard-won knowledge.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-097-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
