Though there’s no truly coherent thesis here, it’s a pleasure to watch Tóibín rove through 19th- and 20th-century literary...
Irish novelist and essayist Tóibín (Brooklyn, 2009, etc.) investigates how writers’ classic works were inspired by their families—and sometimes in spite of them.
One line of critical thinking holds that a writer’s personal history is out of bounds when judging a poem, play or novel. Tóibín, who mined the life of Henry James for his 2004 novel, The Master, doesn’t adhere to that notion, and these essays are largely concerned with how writers’ personal lives influenced their work. In the opening essay, the author explores why James and Jane Austen tended to avoid writing about mothers, who “get in the way in fiction,” and how that instinct was partly a product of their occasionally tense family relationships. Half the pieces that follow focus on Irish writers, including William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Roddy Doyle; the other half consider the non-Irish likes of Thomas Mann, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin and others. Most of these pieces, written for the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books, are piecework prompted by a new biography or collection of letters, but common themes emerge. Dominating mothers provoked Irish playwright J.M. Synge and Beckett (who declared in a letter, “I am what her savage loving has made me”), and closeted homosexuality frustrated Williams and Cheever’s lives and writing alike. Tragedies abound: Yeats brutally dismissed his father’s literary ambitions, Thomas Mann’s children were a riot of addiction and dysfunction, and Hart Crane’s pioneering career as a poet ended in suicide. But like all fine critics, Tóibín inspires readers to go back to the work, and he brings a human aspect to the works of seemingly deracinated authors like Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges.
Though there’s no truly coherent thesis here, it’s a pleasure to watch Tóibín rove through 19th- and 20th-century literary history.Pub Date: June 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6855-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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