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THE NIGHT GARDENER

Name: THE NIGHT GARDENER
Author: Marjorie Sandor
ISBN: 1-55821-931-5

A SEARCH FOR HOME

by Marjorie Sandor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999

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There’s a distracted, plangent tone to Sandor’s (A Night of Music: Stories, 1989) memoir, which unspools in episodic glimpses of bruised sensibilities, indigo moods, and moments when she wakens to brief pleasures. From the start, Sandor finds her cards without merit: “I missed the truth and my family’s golden age all at once: a perception perhaps given divinely unto all last, late, and accidental children.” Her life proceeds as a series of half-steps and aches, of not quite measuring up to expectations (in particular, she, her mother, a piano, and Mozart dance awkwardly), and the saving grace comes in an unexpected package, her staid father’s friend and opposite, Uncle Maury, who lives and breathes literature and polishes delightful little windows through which she can peek at her family: “While my father slept, or pretended to, Maury went on. He called him a ‘musical peasant.” Did I know my father loved ‘schmaltz?” “ She marries and has a child and her husband takes up photography, “a brilliant tactic for sudden escape” that she emulates by going fishing. In some of her least self-consumed writing, Sandor relates her introduction into the Masonic art of fly-fishing, where she both gets played as a chump and discovers “a moment of unmarked, unannounced partnership with the wilderness . . . the hope that comes from standing at the gates of the kingdom we abandoned so long ago, and are always running from.” Then she falls in love with someone other than her husband (both men remain ciphers, unlike her father and Uncle Maury), and her separation from her daughter ushers Sandor back into a lost country of regret and remembrance, a landscape of guilt and grief that readers will have little mercy for having brought on her own head. Sandor might see her life as Mozart his music, a “passion for comedy in the midst of the sublimely sad,” but she brings ruefulness, not play, to the endeavor.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-55821-931-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Lyons Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.