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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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