Bei Dao is alive in exile, not in mourning because of it.
Fresh, inventive passages from an expatriate Chinese poet’s peripatetic wanderings.
They began in 1987, and Bei Dao has been on the move ever since. He travels with ease through the restless Chinese cultural circles that have sprung up abroad, but he also moves with an unusual comfort through New York, Paris and Prague. And he carries in his pocket something that serves him well: humor. In New York City, he observes that few New Yorkers are religious. “This has something to do with the elevators . . . ascending into the sky and then plunging down through the earth, it is almost impossible to have any sense of the mysteries of heaven or the underworld.” Like many an exile, he is alert and observant, aware of a Parisian night as cool as water, or the sound of a weed growing from a medieval Czech town wall, rustling in the wind. (He hears Kafka’s bones clacking in the same wind.) His eye may pause on something political. Ramallah’s bustling poverty reminds him of towns in China and South Africa; traveling companion Breyten Breytenbach finds Israeli officials there even more efficient in imposing “the greatest difficulty on . . . people’s lives” than the enforcers of apartheid were in his native South Africa. Even when Bei Dao is making one of his more eccentric observations (“Y sneezed twice in my face. He was exhausted from photographing purses”), he never exudes whimsy. His prose is quick on its feet but has a very specific gravity, aware as it is of life’s precariousness. Certainly part of the great pleasure of reading Bei Dao comes from his ability to shift smoothly between the historic and the mundane, from Tiananmen Square to mixing concrete in China’s Hebei Province (he settles words into a sentence with the surety he might use to press a brick onto a wall), from a Weather Underground bomb leveling a Greenwich Village townhouse to his daughter asking him to wait on the sidewalk while she tries on some new clothes.
Bei Dao is alive in exile, not in mourning because of it.Pub Date: May 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-8112-1584-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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