All of the fragments that make up this memoir by the contemporary master have appeared previously in (mostly) British periodicals. But not all of them meet Trevor's usually high literary standards. Less surprisingly, Trevor here speaks in the same measured tones of his fiction, and there is little in the way of self- revelation. Arranged chronologically by subject—not year of composition—the earliest pieces form a compelling portrait of Protestant life in the hard-core Catholic south of Ireland, where Trevor, in his youth, was always treated fairly, even in Catholic schools. Carried along by his father's itinerant career in banking, the Trevor boys were exposed to the wondrous landscape of Ireland. Trevor remembers with particular fondness County Cork, but his real love was indoors at the cinema, where he escaped from a series of horrid schools and teachers. Boarding school in Dublin was dreadful under a headmaster whose only concerns were cricket and spelling bees. But there were inspiring teachers as well: a sculptor with exacting standards, a Yeats scholar of ethereal brilliance, and a theologian of sound moral reason. Later, at Trinity, Trevor spent more time enjoying Dublin nightlife than serious scholarly pursuits, all of which ill prepared him for his first job as a schoolteacher. In London, during the Fifties, Trevor slowly acquired the skills of a copywriter, surrounded by all sorts of interesting characters and supervised by an indulgent boss. The last third of this patchwork book pieces together travel essays about the Shah's Iran, New York City in the 70's, and "invigorating" San Francisco. Literary reviews take the author so far from himself that it comes as a pleasant shock when he ends with a lyrical celebration of the Nire Valley in County Tipperary. Vintage Trevor—most especially in the self-deprecating early sketches and the schoolboy portraits.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0140240292
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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