Food for thought and argument, invitations to widen the scope of one’s own reading. A fine addition to Parks’s rapidly...
A lively collection of 19 generally stimulating book reviews and literary pieces, most of which appeared in the New York Review of Books, by the prolific British novelist (Destiny, 2000, etc.), memoirist (An Italian Education, 1995, etc.), and essayist (Adultery and Other Diversions, 1999, etc.)
Parks, who lives and teaches in Verona, displays his credentials as a knowledgeable Italophile in the rich title essay, a review of Robert Hollander’s new translation of Dante’s Inferno that expertly analyzes the great poem’s virtuosic blending of history, theology, and literary artifice and offers a crisp comparative survey of earlier English versions. He also considers a biography of the 19th-century poet, idler, and hypochondriac Leopardi (“Surviving Giacomo”); Sicilian Giovanni Verga’s harshly naturalistic tales (“A Chorus of Cruelty”); the unconventional cultural nexus that embraced such great modernists as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and poet Umberto Saba (“Literary Trieste”); and, in the most probing of these essays, the life of futurist painter Mario Sironi (“Fascist Work”). The intricacies and pitfalls of literary translation (another skill Parks has mastered) are a frequent subtopic and take center stage in “Different Worlds,” which speculates intriguingly on the truism “that the same text can be so radically different in two different languages.” Elsewhere, Parks analyzes such modern classics as Henry Green’s under-appreciated novel Party Going (with its “marvelous fizz of shenanigans,” Dino Buzzati’s eerie allegory, The Tartar Steppe, and Jorge Luis Borges’s enchantingly fluid and learned nonfiction essays. Incisive reviews of current fiction (including Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, and José Saramago’s Blindness) are balanced by such pleasant surprises as his thoughtful review of Jay Neugeboren’s moving book about his brother’s schizophrenia (“In the Locked Ward”) and a pungent explication of British anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s theory of “schismogenesis,” which attempts to explain “strong personality differentiation within an overall group ethos.”
Food for thought and argument, invitations to widen the scope of one’s own reading. A fine addition to Parks’s rapidly growing oeuvre.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-610-4
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
While he wastes some time exposing cliches—Indians in westerns, unworthy sequels—that are cliches to expose, Eco...
Popular novelist (The Name of the Rose, 1983; Foucault's Pendulum, 1989) and notorious semiologist (at the Univ. of Bologna) Eco shows himself to be a journalist as well with this generally diverting volume of short pieces.
Eco calls these short essays diario minimo—minimal diaries—after the magazine column where he first published a series of such efforts (previously collected in Misreadings). The work presented here, much of which dates from the late '80s and early '90s, celebrates, or more often condemns, postmodern life in a style familiar to American readers. Occasional parodic fantasies in the mode of Borges or Calvino find Eco exploring the intriguing, if absurd, notion of a map in 1:1 scale, chronicling race relations in a future universe populated by humorously bizarre alien life-forms, or describing watches whose features cause one to lose track of the time. But Eco focuses on articulating his amusing complaints, analyzing our quotidian myths with light touches and lamentations that will recall Andy Rooney and Erma Bombeck—at best, an academic Mike Royko—sooner than Roland Barthes. Pieces on once-current events have been carefully excluded, but most of these essays remain essentially journalistic in their devotion to exploring contemporary life. The title piece pits Eco against an English hotel bureaucracy intent on making it difficult for him to refrigerate an expensive salmon that he has brought from Copenhagen; others mock "how-to'' essays—on fax machines and cellular telephones, for example; there are cautionary tales of encounters with Amtrak trains and Roman cabs. All have as their subtext the chaos brought in the wake of unbridled technological innovation and intercontinental travel.
While he wastes some time exposing cliches—Indians in westerns, unworthy sequels—that are cliches to expose, Eco entertains with his clever reflections and with his unique persona, the featured player in his stories.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100136-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Esposito may not tell all, but he comes close in this brutally honest, yet loyal, memoir of his days with the King. From when they met in the Army to the afternoon when he was one of the first to discover the dead body of Elvis Presley where he had collapsed from his toilet throne (Esposito was the one who raised his pajama trousers to avoid embarrassment), Presley's right-hand man was in a position to know the inside scoop. He and Oumano (Paul Newman, 1989) describe Elvis as being like a little boy who spent his wealth making himself and the people around him happy. The anecdotes are endless as this pivotal member of the ``Memphis Mafia'' comes clean on the partying Elvis's parade of girlfriends and his suitcase full of sexy videotapes and Polaroids of Priscilla (Esposito handed it to her the moment she arrived at Graceland for the funeral). Esposito tells of the Elvis who stopped passersby to give them money or gifts, who would decide suddenly that ten or so of his friends all needed Harleys to race around Bel Air, who would not flinch at buying a car for family or friends who were loyal to him, and who made an infamous visit to see President Nixon. But he also gives up the goods on the Elvis who was hopelessly self-indulgent, constantly demonstrating his dubious karate skills, buying people off with expensive gifts rather than admitting he was wrong, and finally dying a prisoner in his own bedroom, uninterested in facing new challenges and addicted to prescription drugs. Video rentals of Girls! Girls! Girls! are sure to surge so people can look for the scene in which Elvis sports an erection in his too-tight pants. While apologetic and loyalist at times, Esposito doesn't let the King off too easy. (16 pages of b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79507-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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