Still, those planning a trip to the Louvre or a browsing tour through the stacks devoted to la belle France will find...
A most un-English embrace of all (well, most) things French by the noted English novelist (Love, Etc., 2001, etc.).
Barnes has a far more intimate knowledge of next-door-neighbor France than most of his famously insular (in more ways than one) compatriots, and for several reasons: “Both my parents taught French; I went to France with them on holiday; I read French at school and university; I taught for a year at a Catholic school in Rennes (where my gastronomic conservatism was unpicked); my favorite writer is Flaubert; many of my intellectual reference points are French; and so on.” These essays are an expression of his many enthusiasms, which are slightly more refined than those of one of his subjects, the historian Richard Cobb, who “preferred les petites gens both in his life and in his writing”; like Cobb, Barnes is at home among florists and bakers, parking attendants and small-town bankers, but his real loci are the likes of Monet and Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard and, yes, Gustave Flaubert, the subject of many of the pieces collected here. (Most were previously published in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.) About Flaubert, that great examiner of the bourgeois mind, Barnes is most illuminating, finding in his writings the qualities of “fluency, profligacy, range, and sexual frankness; to which we should add power, control, wit, emotion, and furious intelligence.” Barnes’s own writings here show many of those qualities, particularly intelligence and range, but those not familiar with allusive (and elusive) style and not already disposed to share his francophilia may find them arid at times, and perhaps even beyond the ken of all but the most sophisticated native.
Still, those planning a trip to the Louvre or a browsing tour through the stacks devoted to la belle France will find Barnes’s essays to be a worthy companion.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41513-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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