A fascinating, sometimes bumpy ride through the more grotesque regions of literary experience, for lovers of the half-rhyme...
English critic Wilson's study of several notoriously intense couplings shows how certain literary obsessions—assimilating the world through reading, sustaining oneself through writing—become interchangeable with heterosexual passion.
Perhaps the most famous example of literary seduction, that of Robert Browning by Elizabeth Barrett, stands in Wilson's introduction for the kind of relationship she is not investigating. Although it offers a very clear case of a passion for someone's writing can be transferred to the author's self, the Barrett-Browning affair resolved itself into something too fully personal to illustrate the kind of conflation of literary with physical engagement that Wilson has in mind. Instead, her model case is the far stormier relation between Byron and Caroline Lamb. Psychoanalysis and the mythic preoccupations of literary Modernism provide the background for the entwining narcissisms of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, as well as for the mutually devouring ideals of Robert Graves and Laura Riding. The chapter on Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam considers these drives in the very different climate of totalitarian political repression, where the very literal struggle between artistic power and physical force compelled poets to become their poems, and readers to become their sarcophagi. A final note on Yeats finds a rather unexpected opposition between the spiritual appeal of compulsive writing and obsessive romanticism. Although Wilson is not addressing an academic audience, she occasionally presumes on a wider literary culture than should be expected of a general reader; conscientious editing would have yielded more straightforward exposition and textual examples, and some needed brevity. Her arguments are, nevertheless, passionate and absorbing, and the overall aim to infuse the acts of reading and writing with a sense of mystery and urgency is laudable.
A fascinating, sometimes bumpy ride through the more grotesque regions of literary experience, for lovers of the half-rhyme between books and sex.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26193-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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