A mostly inscrutable collection of personal epiphanies by the late Cuban novelist and belletrist (Cobra, 1974, etc.). Sarduy's preface hardly clarifies the elliptical fragments that follow: ``They are traces left by things ephemeral.... They constitute a record of things thatsometimes by chanceonce put me in touch with something.'' The brief chapters, most only a few pages long, plumb the author's Cuban youth, his departure for Paris in 1960, his adulthood in France, his wide travels before his death from AIDS in 1993. Sarduy describes a few of his scars; a few of his friendships; the banks of the Ganges at Benares; the iconography of the soul's escape from the dying body; archaic stone monoliths in Brittany; a sexual encounter with a stranger; some memories of paintings (including the huge image of Christ's scourging, seen en route to the Louvre atop a truck, that inspired the book's title); and the atmosphere of Tangier. He also mentions the war in Afghanistan and the Mexico City earthquake, taking horror and delight, respectively, in the behaviors of people under duress. Sarduy juxtaposes memories and images but usually doesn't communicate what makes these combinations revelatory to him; worst of all, when he analyzes his epiphanies, he does so using the oblique, tired jargon of semiotics: ``gesture,'' ``hieroglyphic,'' ``simulacra,'' even ``hermeneutic inadequacy.'' The author was, unsurprisingly, a pal of Roland Barthes, who appears here in one of two memoirs about drinking at the CafÇ de Flore (Bloody Marys for Sarduy, black coffee for Barthes). In fact, much of the book seems to revolve around Sarduy's imbibing, which must have been prodigious; in one early passage, he muses revealingly about how he tries to reproduce the intoxication of the creative act through alcohol. Maybe drunkenness had something to do with the failure of this elusive work.
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 1-56279-075-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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