Stimulating, intellectually exciting, and highly imaginative.
A debut collection of essays covering the scope of modern literature, along with a quiet plea for its violent overthrow.
When it comes to realism, McCarthy, the author of such experimental novels as Remainder (2007), C. (2011), and Satin Island (2015), doesn’t seek authenticity; he wants an explosion. The kind of real he has in mind involves "a radical and disastrous eruption within the always-and-irremediably inauthentic; a traumatic real; a real that's linked to repetition; a real whose framework of comprehension is ultimately neither literary nor philosophical but psychoanalytic." These essays are all invigorating examinations of writers (and artists such as Gerhard Richter, On Kawara, Ed Ruscha) who destroyed boundaries, collapsed rules of time, space, and gender, and bombed their own systems of control. On Joyce’s radical use of language in Ulysses, for example, McCarthy remarks, “this is not interior monologue; it’s exterior consciousness, embodied—or encorpsed—consciousness that has ruptured conventional syntax’s membrane, prolapsed.” More than 150 years earlier there was Laurence Sterne, who wrote a masterpiece in which conventional narrative order falls apart. "Error is everywhere in Tristram Shandy; it's the most glitch-ridden book imaginable—it's all glitch," McCarthy writes. "Everything gets lost or misdirected; every action generates unwanted consequences." A most illuminating essay on Kafka interprets the great writer’s “Letter to His Father” in cybernetic terms, as a counterproductive “feedback loop,” in which the relationship becomes not self-repairing but self-destructive. Through it all, McCarthy seems to be mapping out the coordinates of his own ambitions, wondering if there’s any unchartered territory left. The thought is there in the book’s final sentence, in a concluding essay on the life and work of the late Kathy Acker: “It might just be that the final measure of a writer is not so much what they achieve themselves as what they render possible for others.”
Stimulating, intellectually exciting, and highly imaginative.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68137-086-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.
The undisputed champion of the self-conscious and the self-deprecating returns with yet more autobiographical gems from his apparently inexhaustible cache (Naked, 1997, etc.).
Sedaris at first mines what may be the most idiosyncratic, if innocuous, childhood since the McCourt clan. Here is father Lou, who’s propositioned, via phone, by married family friend Mrs. Midland (“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to . . . talk to someone who really . . . understands”). Only years later is it divulged that “Mrs. Midland” was impersonated by Lou’s 12-year-old daughter Amy. (Lou, to the prankster’s relief, always politely declined Mrs. Midland’s overtures.) Meanwhile, Mrs. Sedaris—soon after she’s put a beloved sick cat to sleep—is terrorized by bogus reports of a “miraculous new cure for feline leukemia,” all orchestrated by her bitter children. Brilliant evildoing in this family is not unique to the author. Sedaris (also an essayist on National Public Radio) approaches comic preeminence as he details his futile attempts, as an adult, to learn the French language. Having moved to Paris, he enrolls in French class and struggles endlessly with the logic in assigning inanimate objects a gender (“Why refer to Lady Flesh Wound or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”). After months of this, Sedaris finds that the first French-spoken sentiment he’s fully understood has been directed to him by his sadistic teacher: “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” Among these misadventures, Sedaris catalogs his many bugaboos: the cigarette ban in New York restaurants (“I’m always searching the menu in hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable”); the appending of company Web addresses to television commercials (“Who really wants to know more about Procter & Gamble?”); and a scatological dilemma that would likely remain taboo in most households.
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-77772-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
PERSPECTIVES
With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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