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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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