Lucid and intelligent, but perhaps a little too low-key.
From National Book Award–winning novelist Tuck (The News from Paraguay, 2004, etc.), a concise biography of the Italian writer whose fiction explored the power of make-believe and the delusions by which people live.
Elsa Morante (1912–85) was unconventional from the moment of her birth—the eldest of four, all fathered by a man not their mother’s husband—to after her death, when a group of friends dug up her cremated remains and took them to be scattered in the waters surrounding the island of Procida, the setting for her beloved 1957 novel, Arturo’s Island. She married fellow novelist Alberto Moravia in 1941 and was still his wife when she died, but they had lived apart for years and had never been faithful, though they remained friends. Desperately poor as a struggling young writer, Morante displayed in her fiction a profound sympathy for the oppressed, the misfit and those disfigured or incapacitated by disease. This attitude would find its most emphatic expression in her 1974 bestseller History, controversial among Italy’s left-leaning intellectuals because the politically unaligned Morante painted such a pessimistic picture of proletarian life and the depredations of power. Fiercely devoted to truth-telling, she could be an uncomfortable person to know, but she was generous and loyal to her friends. (And expected the same; she never spoke again to Pier Paolo Pasolini after he brutally panned History.) She had wild mood swings, but loved pretty clothes, handsome men (she was one of director Luchino Visconti’s many lovers) and good food and conversation. Well-known and respected in Italy, Morante’s work is much more obscure in the English-speaking world, and it’s not quite clear why Tuck chose to write about her. Though the biographer offers appreciations of the individual novels, she never really conveys a coherent picture of Morante’s achievements as a writer. Those content with a vivid evocation of her powerful personality, however, will be satisfied by Tuck’s graceful aperçus.
Lucid and intelligent, but perhaps a little too low-key.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-147256-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
