by Peter Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2020
Balzac imagined a world of people with rich, intertwined stories. This retelling of these stories pales in comparison.
Loosely connected biographical sketches of Balzac’s central characters sandwiched between two chapters of insightful literary analysis.
French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) has had an inestimable influence on subsequent Western literature and culture. In his return to the inspiring fount of Balzac’s The Human Comedy, Brooks, emeritus professor of comparative literature at Yale, delves into the inner lives of its main characters to illuminate the obsessions and fantasies that drove Balzac’s writing. Unfortunately, after a provocative introduction to his approach in this “oblique biography,” the author’s retelling of the life stories of Balzac’s main characters reads more like a set of CliffsNotes for The Human Comedy. In contrast, the final chapter of this book, “Living in Fictional Lives,” reprises the originality of the introduction and features the discerning and perceptive scrutiny that the author displayed in his earlier analyses of Balzac, The Melodromatic Imagination (1995) and Realist Vision (2008). In closing Balzac’s Lives, Brooks reminds us that Balzac’s vast imagined social world derived from his being able to write down all that was in his head. But getting inside the head and illuminating the inner workings of one of the world’s preeminent novelists is not the same as summarizing his characters’ lives or even their dreams and daydreams. Rather, it may be enough to recognize, as Balzac himself knew, that “invented persons represent…life for us.” As Brooks notes, “their lives are exemplary ways of being. Fictional characters give us as-if experiments in knowing the world.” Just because Balzac projected himself into his characters and continually reinvented his own life through them, it does not necessarily follow that the characters are facets of Balzac’s mind. As Brooks knows well, we read fiction to know the world, not the author.
Balzac imagined a world of people with rich, intertwined stories. This retelling of these stories pales in comparison.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-449-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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New York Times Bestseller
by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
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New York Times Bestseller
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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SEEN & HEARD
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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