Birkerts is a dedicated reader and a novelist’s best friend.
A literary critic (Readings, 1999, etc.) and professor (English/Harvard Univ.) revisits some novels he read years ago and finds in them both enduring beauty and a sometimes shifting resonance.
Birkerts has always been a bibliophagist, from his early days roaming in The Jungle Book and adventuring with the Hardy Boys and James Bond, and he recognizes one of his life’s great fortunes—to be able to read and write both for pleasure and profit. Some of the books he re-examines are predictable choices—The Catcher in the Rye, Women in Love, Madame Bovary, Lolita—but there are some surprises, too, both mild (The Moviegoer, The Beggar Maid) and major (Pan and Montauk). He says that Humboldt’s Gift is his favorite. Birkerts has arranged these essays in rough chronological order. In adolescence, he was captivated by The Catcher in the Rye and Holden’s remarkable voice; at 19, it was Madame Bovary, which he read while working on a Montana cattle ranch. Walker Percy helped him through some tough personal issues (lack of money, among them). He confesses to an inability to read Henry James’s The Ambassadors in his youth, despite repeated attempts, and is proud that, at age 52, he finally completed it. The strongest and most engaging essays weave the personal with the literary (his fine piece on D.H. Lawrence, for example). At times—especially when dealing with books more unfamiliar to general readers—Birkerts spends much time summarizing and quoting, and his emotional, provocative voice becomes too faint a whisper. But the author is a remarkable reader, sensitive and alert, and these qualities pervade much of his writing. “Such is the power of memory,” he writes of Virginia Woolf, “and such is its human extent: to create in the person the sensation of vanished circumstance living on.” Great novels, in his view, are all books of revelations.
Birkerts is a dedicated reader and a novelist’s best friend.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-55597-464-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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