Sharp, stylish, and anecdotal, the books offers a fresh glimpse into a fertile artistic world.
Personal perspectives on the creation of modernism.
First published in 1963, this charming collection of reminiscences by surrealist poet Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) offers warm, generous, appreciative profiles of some of his famous contemporaries. Framed by an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, who interviewed Soupault as part of his research about Breton, and an afterword by poet Ron Padgett, who met the author in 1975, the volume includes pieces on writers whom Soupault knew well, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, René Crevel, Pierre Reverdy, Georges Bernanos, and Blaise Cendrars, and two from the past: painter Henri Rousseau and poet Charles Baudelaire. Coming of age as an artist after World War I, Soupault says the spirit of the times was one of destruction, incited by the arrival of Tristan Tzara (“like a bomb”), who brought Dadaism, the iconoclastic movement that set the stage for surrealism. Dada, Soupault saw, was trying “to destroy all the established values, the literary practices, and the moral bias that the great captains of literature and journalism want to continue imposing.” Although not a Dadaist, Apollinaire recognized a “new spirit” in art; calling himself “a signal rocket,” he was an outspoken defender of cubism. The shocked response to his writings taught Soupault the importance of scandal. He deeply admired Joyce, who at the time they met was writing Ulysses; they went to the theater and opera together, always sitting in the first row, where the nearly blind Joyce could better see the stage. As a writer, Soupault observed, Joyce was “tormented by a word, rebelliously constructing a framework…drawing a hallucination from music.” Padgett notes that Reverdy and Cendrars, two vastly different personalities, served as Soupault’s mentors. Reverdy coveted solitude; Cendrars loved people, hanging out at the Café de Flore, “fedora askew and cigarette butt on his lip,” always “madly cheerful.”
Sharp, stylish, and anecdotal, the books offers a fresh glimpse into a fertile artistic world.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-87286-727-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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