With one uncharacteristically personal and moving exception, Gordimer (None to Accompany Me, 1994, etc.) offers crisp and richly allusive explorations of the tensions between a writer's art and the realities of life in six essays first delivered as the 1994 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. The first essay, ``Adam's Rib: Fictions and Realities,'' in which she responds to the charge that a writer's characters are based on real people, provides an overview of the ideas she subsequently explores. For her, writing is like ``Primo Levi's metamir, in which a metaphysical mirror does not obey the law of optics but reproduces your image as it is seen by the person who stands before you.'' The writer is such a person and receives intimations, usually hidden, of what you areintimations that become fiction, in which the writer is neither a looter of characters nor an absentee presence dependent on the reader as ``producer of the text.'' Her second essay, ``Hanging on a Sunrise: Testimony and the Imagination in Revolutionary Writings,'' discusses the state of writing in postapartheid South Africa, as members of the ANC publish their memoirs, the best of which possess a ``spirit beyond and above setting the story straight, which is the business and usefulness of testimony.'' Essays such as ``Zaabalawi: The Concealed Side,'' ``To Hold the Yam and the Knife,'' and ``Forgotten Promised Land'' respectively explore the writer's quest ``for the Home that is the truth, undefined by walls, by borders, by regimes'' in Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy, Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah; and Amos Oz's Fima. And in ``That Other World that was the World,'' Gordimer explains how she, the child of immigrants, came to write, and how after years of alienation under apartheid, she ``may now speak of `my people.' '' A well-argued brief for writers and writing to which Gordimer's South African experience adds a unique perspective.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-674-96232-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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