Nuanced essays from a challenging writer whose appeal varies widely.
Wide-ranging personal essays from one of Western literature’s more controversial authors.
Plenty of artists are a mixed bag, but the dichotomy Handke (b. 1942) presents is starker than most. The recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature, he is an unquestionably gifted author with an impressive oeuvre. Yet he takes strident political stances, such as his support of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, who was charged with war crimes. Both sides of Handke, the former more than the latter, appear in these five essays. Topics include his perpetual search for quiet spaces, a quest that expressed “if not a flight from society, perhaps a revulsion against society, an aversion to society”; a defense attorney he calls “my friend the mushroom maniac, who’s vanished without a trace”; insomnia and “the divergent views of the world engendered by different kinds of tiredness,” including fatigue borne of political struggles; an attempt to write about jukeboxes, a mission he quickly found insignificant given that year’s political events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall; and a meditation on elements that constitute a successful day, whether for an author’s writing or for humankind in general. Handke makes curious statements—e.g., calling Austrians “the first hopelessly corrupt, totally incorrigible people in history, incapable of repentance or conversion”—and the prose, at least in translation, can get flamboyant: “Tell me about this successful day. Show me the dance of the successful day. Sing me the song of the successful day!” Yet the author is also admirably self-critical, asking in the essay on the trivial topic of jukeboxes at a time of world upheaval, “Was there anyone in the present time, when every day was a new historic date, more ridiculous, more perverse than himself?” The book also contains some welcome light touches, as when, in the essay on tiredness, he asks of himself, “Why so philosophical all of a sudden?”
Nuanced essays from a challenging writer whose appeal varies widely.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-12559-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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