Exiled in Spain during Chile's Pinochet years, Neruda's close friend and political associate Teitelboim wrote this first major biography of the Chilean poet. Teitelboim's approach is sound on the whole. Neruda, who began to write poetry at eight and never stopped, was a force of nature, his genius an insoluble riddle. Teitelboim quotes generously from the poems and seeks their immediate source in the details of Chilean politics and Neruda's love life. He doesn't bludgeon or needle the work with textual, Freudian, or any other form of cant- ridden analysis. On the other hand, he's so close to his subject he can trip over its feet. Evoking the Chilean landscape, he sometimes writes a pale pastiche of the master. Describing the Bohemian intellectual scene of Santiago circa 1920, he drops names so freely an American reader may be bewildered. In his brief, episodic chapters, though, the savory anecdotes multiply. Neruda had a great appetite for love and friendship and the improvised life. Tales of his early stint as honorary Chilean consul in Rangoon, his years in Madrid with Garc°a Lorca, are delightful and heart-rending. If only the tone weren't so relentlessly post-Stalinist p.c. Lorca's being gay is not mentioned. Neither are the battles between anarchists and communists in the Spanish Civil War, or between Stalinists and the Trotsky circle in Mexico in the 40's. Neruda's political involvement had its ironies, not hinted at here. The result is a flattening of his complex, contradictory character in the later chapters. What does come through is the long history of American meddling in Chile, going back to the 40's. Still, Teitelboim's take on Neruda, his friend of 40 years, is unique. He knew the poet's mistress/muses when they were young and fresh. He knows them now, old, frail, and querulous. Shifting readily between vibrant past and faded present, he has written a work of elegiac charm, one that reads like a novel whose real subject, as in Neruda's beloved Proust, is the ravages wrought by passing Time.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1991
ISBN: 0-292-75548-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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