Simply, gracefully and wisely written, saturated with the sorrows and joys of years.
A writer searches out the significant sites in the life of Ivan Turgenev and ponders love, obsession, creation and literary celebrity.
No bald description can do justice to this moving and poignant work, the latest from Dessaix, whose memoir Night Letters (1997) showed how artfully he can intertwine the mundane and miraculous. An Australian who now lives in Tasmania, Dessaix first became interested in Russia and its language in the 1950s, when Sputnik was beeping overhead. Not many years afterward, he lived and studied in the Soviet Union and became a noted scholar (Turgenev: The Quest for Faith, 1980). Here, he begins his account in Baden-Baden (where the great novelist lived for a time), then travels to France and Russia to visit the places where Turgenev resided, wrote, loved, suffered and died (not all the sites are extant). He sees, as well, places where his characters played out their parts—staircases they descended, restaurants they frequented. Dessaix is fascinated with Turgenev’s 40-year passion for the singer Pauline Viardot-García, a married woman of ordinary if not homely looks. Turgenev lived near (and even with) her for long periods, enjoying her husband’s company, as well. Dessaix believes there was no sexual contact between the writer and Pauline—but there was patent eroticism. Along the way, the traveler and author contemplates some of life’s great conundrums, the pains and pleasures undergone by Turgenev and, for that matter, by all of us. He summarizes relevant passages from the novels—both the well-known and the unknown—and, along the way, examines his own successes and failures in intimacy. Some of his sentences are surpassingly lovely (Turgenev’s “single theme,” he writes, “refracting a single flame: I love you, yet we must die”). Dessaix also takes some amusing potshots at hunters and at the excessively credulous and pious. And he resolves to reread Turgenev.
Simply, gracefully and wisely written, saturated with the sorrows and joys of years.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59376-063-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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