Often heady, occasionally pretentious, and steeped in literary touchstones.
A collection of autobiographical essays distorted through the lenses of memory and literature.
Saldaña París writes of his time in Mexico City, Montreal, Madrid, and beyond as “an autobiographical melting” (borrowing a term from Robert Creeley), and he frequently uses the literary canon to shape his recollections. In “Malcolm Lowry in the Supermarket,” he looks to Lowry’s Under the Volcano to piece together details of his own childhood and adolescence in Cuernavaca. He considers his own memory “riddled by research” and explains that the stories he’s read have “superimposed themselves, forming a pastiche that I now employ to replace experience.” The title essay, about nine years spent in Mexico City, invokes both the work of Roberto Bolaño and Witold Gombrowicz in an effort to “embrace [the city’s] ugliness.” Beyond these literary references, Saldaña París frequently ruminates on the act of writing in many meta digressions. He explains that the essay “Return to Havana” is the result of a series of handwritten revisions. “A Winter Underground,” one of the highlights, recounts the author’s time in Montreal and his struggles with addiction; it opens with a declaration that the text would be written entirely after midday, as “language, in the evenings, is dense.” The author’s confidence carries many of the essays: “I liked to talk loud and clear, as if I were always right,” he declares. Later, he recalls writing his first book with “a fireproof arrogance.” In “Notes on the Fetishization of Silence,” he describes his own breathing as “the music of me being alive.” The author’s knack for finding profundity in everything makes for an occasionally exhausting read; still, most of the pieces are thoughtful weavings of memory and place, explorations of how the author’s heavy reading both informs—and, at times, obfuscates—his understanding of the past.
Often heady, occasionally pretentious, and steeped in literary touchstones.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781646222315
Page Count: -
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving.
An actor and comedian tells the story of her journey from being an unpaired “animal” to a “new mammal mother” in love.
After Slate completed her first book, “the issue of finding a partner…never rested and never allowed rest for [her] either.” Senses heightened, she had stepped into her most animal self and was on a quest to “fulfill [her] mammal instincts.” Loneliness and emotional vulnerability made her seek connection with neighborhood dogs and insights from books that promised to bring soulmates. When love did finally find her, the anxiety that he would reject her for being herself and “drinking tequila on a Saturday afternoon…then [having] a bath with my friend” was intense. After the pair became a couple and Slate became pregnant with the baby she called “the lifeform,” her neuroses—which the author mocks through an imaginary session with a psychologist—went into overdrive. Yet even as she wrestled with her fears, Slate also discovered that the body that was so often a “bay of doubt” was also becoming a “harbor of well-being” for the life-form to which she was attached. Then, during a time of “plague and disruption,” the author “exploded [her] vagina” to give birth, becoming not only a mother, but a “mammal with a soul that [was] born anew every day.” Though still haunted by a “purple-dark hole marking me in the afternoons,” Slate had become secure enough in the “nest” she had built for herself to see the hole more as a “bluish egg-thing” portending possibility. At times whimsical in its flights of fancy and always surprising in the moments of lyrical grace it offers, Slate’s book celebrates the transformative power of surrendering to love and life.
Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780316263931
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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