Readers will marvel not only at Marceau, but at the book itself, which displays such command of the material and such...
A unique, poetic critical appreciation of Marcel Marceau (1923-2007).
The first few pages of radio producer and artist Wen’s short book look like blank verse, with succinct lines and plenty of white space. As the narrative unfolds into a meditation on the famous French mime, the poetry never leaves, even as Marceau’s inner voice advises, “leave speech behind. The body has its own language: weight, resistance, hesitation, surprise.” Surprises abound within these chapters, many no longer than a paragraph and few extending more than a couple of pages. The first surprise is the author’s ability to convey, in carefully chosen words, the essence and significance of this wordless art, especially when the reader learns that she is a radio producer, perhaps drawn to her subject because radio is the least promising medium for mime. Then there’s the American attitude toward mime in general, a disdain that makes such a fascinating book on one all the more of a wonder. “A journalist asked Marcel Marceau why most Americans hated mime,” writes Wen. “Marceau responded, ‘Because most mimes are lousy.’ ” The author meticulously details what distinguished the artist, the self-proclaimed “Picasso of mime,” in a series of scenes that show the magic of his performances and in annotated catalogs of the collections of artifacts that made the environment he constructed what his daughter called a “world apart” and a “virtual museum.” Wen also tiptoes into his personal life. His first wife “said he would not speak to her for days on end. She called it mental cruelty. He called it rehearsal.” She also traces the arc of his decline, his old age and death, and the apostle he left behind: “They learned to reproduce his gestures faithfully. And when they succeeded in mirroring the master, they began to unravel the art.”
Readers will marvel not only at Marceau, but at the book itself, which displays such command of the material and such perfect pitch.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941411-48-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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