More fine brushes with the rank and splendor of everyday life from Pickering (The Blue Caterpillar, 1997, etc.). Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from it a more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived. “The stories I tell are stationary. The narratives don’t teach or inspire.” Dozy and comfortable as they are, his essays also urge readers to preserve the clarity of the moment, to stop looking for meaning and significance under every rock, to get of their duff, take a walk. Here are a dozen of his pieces, all Brownian and witty and melding fiction with nonfiction (he insinuates a homespun cast of characters from Carthage, Tenn.—a motley crew of the halt and the lame—as counterpoints to drive opinions home, as with “I prefer bright lies to drab truth.” One essay finds him summering in Nova Scotia, spending brambled days with a restless wife and two dogs that never get the drift about porcupine quills. In another, it is autumn and Pickering is at the losing end of a collision with a swimming pool wall, shaking loose intimations of mortality. There is a tour of irritability, the result of falling and breaking a few ribs (his wife, inured to his bumbling, greets him at the door with “My God! What have you done now, you asshole?”); and there is a celebration of crotchetiness prompted by the doldrums of February. These are all stories of the commonplace, but in Pickering’s hands they rise like yeast, a chemistry of clever writing that teases oblique pleasure from the mundane.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8214-1234-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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