An indispensable volume for fans of Vargas Llosa, Latin American literature, and the art of great writing.
Conversations on politics and writing with the 2010 Nobel laureate in literature.
After he joined the Princeton faculty in 2002, Gallo met Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) when the latter spoke at the university about his essay on Les Misérables. When Gallo then became director of the Latin American studies program, he invited Vargas Llosa to spend several semesters teaching there. Gallo has since gone through 50 hours of recordings and notes on the seminars he and Vargas Llosa conducted and has collected that information in this magnificent book. In the first chapters, Vargas Llosa discusses “the effect of the great political events of the twentieth century on literature,” followed by his thoughts on the role of journalism in his maturity as a writer. The bulk of the book consists of long discussions of five Vargas Llosa works: the novels Conversation in the Cathedral, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, and The Feast of the Goat; and A Fish in the Water, a hybrid that chronicles Vargas Llosa’s 1990 presidential campaign in his native Peru and a memoir of his youth. The book concludes with a spirited discussion on “the role of the intellectual in the face of the ever more real threat of terrorism.” Many thoughtful questions from Gallo and his students elicit provocative answers on an appealing variety of topics, including the perniciousness of dictatorships, the scourge and popularity of yellow journalism (“there is public pressure for journalism to also be entertainment”), and Vargas Llosa’s approach to writing (he uses “hidden details” that “hide the story’s main event,” a technique he learned from reading Hemingway). The result is a treasure trove of literary advice and political analysis. Vargas Llosa also offers relevant warnings on the ways in which democratic societies can corrode into authoritarianism, as when he notes the ease with which “truths become lies, and lies become truths.”
An indispensable volume for fans of Vargas Llosa, Latin American literature, and the art of great writing.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-12901-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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