At once intimate and objective, Lopate's (Bachelorhood, 1981, etc.) further personal essays meander through the latest stages of his life, continuing their sophisticated, witty explorations of it. If Lopate's contemporary interest in pushing at the first-person essay's ``thin line between the charming and the insufferable'' marks him as a literary performer, his writing here still keeps one foot in the impartial, searching tradition of Montaigne and Hazlitt. Picking up his life where his last collection of autobiographical essays, Against Joie de Vivre (1989), left off, and focusing on his recent preoccupations with fathers, father figures, and paternity, these essays nicely juggle meditative themes with autobiographical disclosure. Lopate calculatedly adopts a self-centered persona to give himself some creative distance, but this first-person camouflage doesn't conceal his genuine concerns with emotional isolation and egoism. The persona entertainingly takes center stage in his confessions about his irritable vacations, his schoolmarmish movie-going manners, and his baffled, superrogatory role in his daughter's birth. It also provides a revealing, slightly warped mirror in such pieces as the title essay, a droll, frank, gossipy tour of the author's anatomy. There are also more serious reflections on the role of the mentor in literary life, as well as a somewhat unoriginal but still provocative essay on guilt-policed Holocaust obsession. At his best, he plays himself off against other personalities: his aged father, former colleague Donald Barthelme, and fellow writer Anatole Broyard, with subtle and moving disclosures on both sides. Caring for his doddering father, he painfully reacquaints himself with the solipsistic obstinacy they share and his reactions to it. (``We spend most of our adulthoods trying to grasp the meanings of our parents' lives; and how we shape and answer these questions largely turns us into who we are.'') A mature voice honestly and humorously addressing a variety of universals through carefully observed particulars.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47710-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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