A hodgepodge memoir in which the author experiences the full range of obsession.
A writer’s literary obsession leads him to discover that Victorian England might be a fine place to visit, but he couldn’t live there.
Clark (Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces, 2008, etc.) turns inward with a hit-and-miss memoir of his “Victoromania.” The author has read more than 100 Victorian novels, many of which are now forgotten. He immersed himself in the art, architecture, philosophy, culture, and religious issues of the era. He traveled to England frequently, staying there once for as long as five months. Earlier, Clark experienced a painful divorce, though he reveals little about it or the marriage preceding it. He believed he could have better luck with online dating in England, and while he met a number of women who shared his interest in the Victorians, nothing came of those meetings. He apparently had the means to travel at will at least in part due to the death of his father after a divorce from his mother, who later divorced his stepfather as well. “I have been a beneficiary; on a small scale when I was younger and on a larger scale as I’ve gotten older, as my elders died off and their wills were read,” he writes. He continues, “I can write what I want without much interruption beyond the teaching I like to do….I worry about what I say, how I say it, and whether it will attract some readers, but not much about getting paid.” There is some purity in this confessional endeavor, and, as Clark freely acknowledges, narcissism. His immersion in the Victorians informs his diffuse reflections on his own writing, his religious conversion, his losses, and, ultimately, his emergence from the fog of that obsession. “That my interest in the Victorians is now no larger than any other interest of mine is, in retrospect, not surprising,” he writes, “though at the time it seemed a very sudden alteration….The Victorians and I were friends, but no more than that.”
A hodgepodge memoir in which the author experiences the full range of obsession.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60938-667-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
