The elegance, originality, and humor of Sante's new book provide a deeply satisfying reading experience. When he was a young child, Sante (Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, 1991, etc.) and his Belgian parents immigrated to the US, settling in New Jersey. Not quite American and not quite Belgian, Sante was more of ``an international co-production.'' Belgian culture, while at the center of his family life, was inherited in fragments. The Factory of Facts is Sante's strikingly original attempt to make sense of these fragments—of himself, his family, and his native country. The 15 chapters don't follow a linear progression, but rather bear Sante's characteristic stamp of a roving and all-embracing curiosity. Fortunately, he has the stylistic genius and temperament to make a cohesive whole of his wide-ranging discourses on everything from Belgian labor history to America in the 1960s. This volume is the very embodiment of Sante's definition of the past as ``a notional construct, a hypothesis, a poem.'' Sante is less interested in his life in the US than in his half-remembered early childhood in Belgium. The bulk of his memoir is a running commentary on the Sante family, his native city of Verviers and its collapsed textile industry, and, above all, the particularities of Belgian culture. Verviers looms large in his reconstruction and plays the role of a character in his past; when Sante writes that he can feel the city in his bones, the reader shares his sensation. Likewise, the stubborn independence, the contradictions (linguistic and other), and the accidental nature and ambiguity of Belgium itself, all drawn with immense acumen and humor, are like Sante himself. Still, he retains an ironic distance from the past that enables him to maintain a self-conscious affection for less dispiriting times than the present. Beyond its Belgian grayness and fascinating specificity, Sante's shrewd and lyrical treatise on the past speaks to us all.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-42410-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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