Waiting for the next installment of Bedford’s “siren song of the daily round.” (Meanwhile, Counterpoint will be reissuing...
Breathless, halting memoir in fragments by the English stylist, friend and biographer of Aldous Huxley, and late-blooming novelist.
Bedford begins in the middle of her life, in 1953, when she’s in her early 40s, meandering happily in Switzerland and savoring the publication of her first novel. By fits and starts, she then moves back in time, noting that in Italy after WWII, on the island of Ischia, when she was 36, she and her journalist friend Martha Gellhorn (post-Hemingway) ran into an old family acquaintance, the so-called “Kraut Baronessa,” who had married a German diplomat and worked on the “wrong side” of the war (friendly with Franco, among others); seeing her evokes the Italian aristocratic milieu of Bedford’s mother, who left her husband and remarried a handsome Italian, Alessandro, and would summon her daughter, living in the English Midlands, to spend the summers with her. Gradually, the full story emerges: Bedford’s loafing Monte Carlo collector father and wealthy, fickle mother raised her for a spell at a grand country house in the southwest corner of Germany before separating to glamorous far-flung regions; eventually, the nearly illiterate daughter ran away from home to find her married half-sister, Jacko, in Rome. Despite her lack of formal education, young Bedford wanted to be a writer, and composed several unpublished novels before her middle-aged coup, all the while journeying across Europe and Mexico with friends such as her mentor Pierre Mimerel, a social philosopher, and Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, who orchestrated Bedford’s hasty marriage to one of their “bugger friends” in order to secure an English passport. It’s a shifting, erratic journey through the century, most affecting when Bedford halts to describe her mother’s descent into morphine addiction, while the 20 later years, living in sunny climes with American Eda Lord, are dismissed in a paragraph.
Waiting for the next installment of Bedford’s “siren song of the daily round.” (Meanwhile, Counterpoint will be reissuing her nine other works.)Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-169-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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