A fine-grained, scholarly exhumation of the buried cultural and especially medical lore that helped shape Kafka's conflicted self-understanding as a Jew in turn-of-the-century Austria and Czechoslovakia. Gilman (Jewish Self-Hatred, 1986, etc.) seeks to reconstruct the lost ``discourses'' of race, gender, and disease in Kafka's time. He argues that Kafka's anxieties about his Jewish identity stem directly from his anxieties about his body and its infirmities, both real and imaginary. Always underweight, nervous, and much inclined to heed the health fads of his day, Kafka fretted a great deal over his health. Then, as if in fulfillment of his expectations, he got really sick. In 1917 he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that killed him in 1924. Kafka regarded his disease as the bodily expression of some deeper spiritual malady. Gilman sensibly proposes that the writer had internalized medical and popular anti-Semitic myths about a supposedly inbred genetic legacy that predisposed Jews to certain illnesses (especially syphilis and tuberculosis) and resulted in what was thought to be the degenerate feminization of European culture at the end of the 19th century. Jewish men in particular, supposedly less robust than their virile ``Aryan'' counterparts, were thought to embody a somatic decline into sickly effeminacy. This general picture of Kafka's own self- understanding is not new. What Gilman offers in the way of fresh insight is a wealth of concrete detail from the prevailing (mis)conceptions of the time's learned and not-so-learned culture. However, Gilman is unable to parlay his deepened understanding of the cultural background into new or revealing readings of Kafka's texts. A work as central to the Kafka canon as The Castle, for example, is dealt with on a single page, which contends vaguely that the novel's setting may have something to do with tuberculosis spas of the day. Excellent, often engrossing as cultural history; disappointing as literary criticism. (illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-415-91177-X
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.
Rock-’n’-soul icon Turner is happy at last, and she wants the world to know it.
The love story of the title is specific: The 78-year-old singer has been with her German mate for 33 years, and though bits and pieces of her body have been failing and misbehaving—she recounts a stroke, kidney failure, cancer, and other maladies—her love is going strong. It’s also generalized: Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, is enchanted by the world, from her childhood countryside to the shores of Lake Zurich, where she has lived nearly half her life. There was another love story, of course, the one that fans will know and lament: her marriage to the drug-addicted, philandering Ike Turner, of whom she writes, pointedly, “at this point in my life, I’ve spent far more time without Ike than with him.” The author emerges from these pages as self-aware and hungry for knowledge and experience. Who knew that she was a dedicated reader of Dante as well as a “favorite aunt” of Keith Richards and a practitioner of Buddhism of such long standing that Ike himself demanded that she lose her shrine? The gossip is light, though she’s clear on the many reasons she broke away from Ike. She’s also forgiving, and as for others in her circle over the years, she calls Mel Gibson “Melvin” because of his “little boy quality,” though she doesn’t approve of certain bad behavior of his. Mostly, her portraits of such figures as David Bowie and Bryan Adams are affectionate, and the secrets she reveals aren’t terribly shocking. Those fishnet stockings and short skirts, she lets slip, were more practical than prurient, the stockings running less easily than nylons and the short skirts “easier for dancing because they left my legs free."
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9824-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.
An acclaimed Mexican-born poet’s account of the sometimes-overwhelming struggles he and his parents faced in their quest to become American citizens.
Hernandez Castillo (Cenzontle, 2018, etc.) first came to the United States with his undocumented Mexican parents in 1993. But life in the shadows came at a high price. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided their home on multiple occasions and eventually deported the author’s father back to Mexico. In this emotionally raw memoir, Hernandez Castillo explores his family’s traumas through a fractured narrative that mirrors their own fragmentation. Of his own personal experiences, he writes, “when I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility.” To protect himself against possible identification as an undocumented person, he excelled in school and learned English “better than any white person, any citizen.” When he was old enough to work, he created a fake social security card to apply for the jobs that helped him support his fatherless family. After high school, he attended college and married a Mexican American woman. He became an MFA student at the University of Michigan and qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed him to visit his father in Mexico, where he discovered the depth of his cultural disorientation. Battling through ever present anxiety, the author revisited his and his parents’ origins and then returned to take on the difficult interview that qualified him for a green card. His footing in the U.S. finally solidified, Hernandez Castillo unsuccessfully attempted to help his father and mother qualify for residency in the U.S. Only after his father was kidnapped by members of a drug cartel was the author able to help his mother, whose life was now in danger, seek asylum in the U.S. Honest and unsparing, this book offers a detailed look at the dehumanizing immigration system that shattered the author’s family while offering a glimpse into his own deeply conflicted sense of what it means to live the so-called American dream.
A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-282559-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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