A fresh perspective on an elusive element of literature.
A focused study of literary tone.
Samatar, author of The White Mosque, and Zambreno, author of The Light Room, offer a lyrical, erudite meditation on the enigmatic concept of tone in literature, drawing on responses from readers in the self-designated Committee to Investigate the Atmosphere. In the eclectic works they examine, tone can take on qualities of fog, dust, rot, snow, and light; color, temperature, or sound. The tone of Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand, for example, seems to their students as “gray.” The authors assert that “tone, as in sound, stands for the oral, the presence of the speaking body. It indicates what is absent from writing.” It stands, as well, for “something like a collective mood.” In a translated novel such as W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, tone becomes “something like a communication of voices.” Samatar and Zambreno consider a wide range of texts, including Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and pieces by Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Borges, and Bolaño; criticism by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and many others. The committee members also provide glimpses of their own lives. They are teachers; one is a nursing mother; one is furnishing a home; one has a young daughter “currently in the stage of liking to draw animals but not feeling confident as to whether she can draw animals in a realistic way.” They are tired of being quarantined and of communicating on Zoom. At a conference, they were buoyed by meeting others interested in tone. When a graduate student remarked that “a professor once told them that Tone was a window,” they were greatly pleased at the aptness of the image. “If tone concerns ecology,” the authors write, “then it is about making a space for relation, and it seems clear now that for us, in the end, our studies in atmosphere have been about making a space where certain things can be said.”
A fresh perspective on an elusive element of literature.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780231211215
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.
The acclaimed director displays his talents as a film critic.
Tarantino’s collection of essays about the important movies of his formative years is packed with everything needed for a powerful review: facts about the work, context about the creative decisions, and whether or not it was successful. The Oscar-winning director of classic films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs offers plenty of attitude with his thoughts on movies ranging from Animal House to Bullitt to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Big Chill. Whether you agree with his assessments or not, he provides the original reporting and insights only a veteran director would notice, and his engaging style makes it impossible to leave an essay without learning something. The concepts he smashes together in two sentences about Taxi Driver would take a semester of film theory class to unpack. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed To Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake without actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Like any good critic, Tarantino reveals bits of himself as he discusses the films that are important to him, recalling where he was when he first saw them and what the crowd was like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author was raised by movie-loving parents who took him along to watch whatever they were watching, even if it included violent or sexual imagery. At the age of 8, he had seen the very adult MASH three times. Suddenly the dark humor of Kill Bill makes much more sense. With this collection, Tarantino offers well-researched love letters to his favorite movies of one of Hollywood’s most ambitious eras.
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311258-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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