A soulful intellectual inquiry and reflection on life and art, artfully done.
Acclaimed Scottish novelist Smith (There but for the, 2011, etc.) considers the places where art and life intersect, sometimes collide and meld.
The guide on this extraordinary journey is a woman who, after “twelvemonth and a day” of mourning, sees her dead lover before her. She offers the apparition tea and begins to ask questions, but the responses are garbled and confused. Smith’s storytelling facility and critical eye are evident in the fact that this ongoing conversation—adapted from a series of lectures at St. Anne’s College, Oxford—about time, memory, loss, longing, love, art and nature stirs the mind and heart all the more because it takes place between the imagination and reality. In the essay “On time,” Smith reminds us of Shakespeare’s “Devouring Time, Time’s pencil, Time’s fell and injurious hand, Time’s scythe, Time’s fickle glass.” Even books, she writes, are “tangible pieces of time in our hands…they travel with us, they accompany us from our pasts into our futures….” In each of the essays, the woman continues her struggle with grief and letting go. Her lost lover returns again and again in an alarming state of increasing decay, and she regrets the failings of her imagination to call up an odorless, less-ragged form. Smith seamlessly connects the narrator’s smart, funny, regret-infused observations to an expansive discussion of aesthetics, metaphor, the tension between form and fluidity, what it means to be on the edge in life and art, the power of Oliver Twist (in all its forms) and Alfred Hitchcock movies, and the acts of giving and taking. On this quest, the author goes into the “margins that burn with the energy of edit” to shed light on the human spirit through art. But does the grieving woman ever let go of her lover’s spirit and move on? It’s all beautifully revealed.
A soulful intellectual inquiry and reflection on life and art, artfully done.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59420-486-9
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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