An equable, frequently elegant, and unpious essay on the vagaries and harmonies of fiction. Although Dillard seems at first (and at the last) to chide modernist fiction for being "device laid bare," she's sophisticated enough to recognize its abiding, even traditional strengths—the plenitude, the overlapping of contexts, the constructive glee: "it dissects the living, articulated joints where temporal events merge and arranges the bright bones on the ground." As the scientifically and epistemologically oriented author of naturalist meditations (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm), Dillard does not discard potential tools of knowledge; she sticks with modernist fiction beyond skepticism and relativism until it too offers up the "bits of world" from which all fiction—most human of arts—is made. She isn't dazzled by language per se: "Language is itself like a work of art: it selects, abstracts, exaggerates, and orders. How then could we say that language encloses and signifies phenomena, when language is a fabricated grid someone stuck in a river?" But she does stand in awe of prose as a cognitive apparatus—"as though a wielded wrench, like a waved soap bubble wand, were to emit a trail of fitted bolts in its wake." For that reason, she's especially fine here on the honor of "plain" prose (Henry Green, Eudora Welty, Wright Morris); its "stubborn uniqueness." Equally lucent is Dillard's chapter on hidden meaning, on the novel of ideas; it serves as a good, if less rigorous, complement to Mary McCarthy's recent laments. But Dillard's central argument is a plea for fiction, with its valuable sloppiness and unshakable traditionalness, to expand into a thoroughgoing, unpinched, and unapologetic branch of knowledge: "We are missing a whole new class of investigators: those who interpret the raw universe in terms of meaning." Dillard's tone may be a little too general, a little too loose (she seems to be measuring her good-natured essayistic lope at all times), but that integrative wish is fundamentally sane and attractive. An enjoyable and thoughtful, often superbly phrased little book.
Pub Date: March 23, 1982
ISBN: 0060915447
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
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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