Veteran novelist Burgess is also a composer—he includes a surprisingly long list of music-works here—and these are "highly personal meditations" on music and literature, their contrasts and intersections. First comes a brief musical autobiography: a music-hall-singer mother whom Burgess never knew (she died when he was less than two), Manchester childhood, with hapless violin lessons followed by the real discovery of music at age twelve (hearing L'Après-midi d'un Faune on the radio); Burgess' determination to be a composer, pop-music as an Army-bandleader, his first symphony ("My orchestration was Elgarian with Holstian condiments"). Then, after a brief, not-very-illuminating consideration of words vs. notes, their impact in time and space, Burgess half-wryly details the 1974 writing of his third symphony, movement by movement, almost bar by bar: "That descent in tritonal fourths is, I foresee, in danger of being employed as a mannerism." Next: some very conventional, if ultimately overstated, musings on "meaning" in music since Bach. ("Music might have pretended, with Berlioz and Strauss, to absorb literature, but in fact it had turned itself into an adjunct to literature—critical, illustrative. Mozart was the last of the great composers.") Equally unsurprising are Burgess' close-up analyses of the musicality in Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythm ("turning the poetic foot into a musical measure"), or in Joyce's prose. And finally, after an intriguing but undeveloped discussion of song lyrics, there are explications of the ostensibly music-like structures of two Burgess novels: the poorly-received MF (1971), whose "story discloses all the elements of a closed structure, like a piece of music"; and Napoleon Symphony, with its structure derived from Beethoven's "Eroica." ("Can music teach anything to the novelist? Yes: the importance of structure.") In sum, then: an uneven potpourri, from the broadly appealing opening memoir to chapters for musicological/literary specialists only—with Burgess alternately charming, blathery, shrewd, obscure. . . and self-indulgent.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1983
ISBN: 155783489X
Page Count: 196
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
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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