An intimate literary investigation; those seeking a broader assessment will need to look elsewhere.
A book-length essay on Proust’s masterpiece.
Early on, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Friedländer writes that he believes In Search of Lost Time is not only the greatest novel of French literature, but one of the most important novels ever written.” In this brief, thought-provoking examination that is likely to appeal most to literary scholars he focuses on the “Narrator’s strange, contradictory statements” and how the Narrator functions as Proust’s “alter ego.” The Narrator is a “disembodied presence unlike that in any novel before,” and Friedländer engages in a close reading of the book to “decipher the author’s strategy.” His extensive quoting from the novel and his many debates with other Proust scholars create something of a running dialogue among many voices. After assessing the Narrator’s love-hate relationship with his mother and Proust’s own deep love for his, Friedländer takes on the book’s puzzling treatment of Jews. Proust was Jewish; his Narrator is not. The Narrator’s attitudes toward Jews are “often negative,” and the novel is “replete with anti-Semitic remarks adopted by the Narrator without any comment.” Friedländer notes the importance of understanding the Narrator’s “obsession with the Jewish question in general and his own identity in particular,” and even though the Narrator never “admits to even a whiff of homosexuality,” it, too, plays a key role in the novel. Most of all, In Search is a “social satire on the grandest scale and an incomparable analysis of complex emotional constructs, but it mostly lacks a sense of tragedy.” A “paean to memory,” it’s very much a “novel about time, but with a twist: it is directed toward the future…in order to recapture the past.” It’s “not Proust’s story that we follow,” Friedländer writes, “but that of his Narrator.” The author is a wise, enthusiastic guide to Proust, but this one is mostly for the academic audience.
An intimate literary investigation; those seeking a broader assessment will need to look elsewhere.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-912-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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