Wolf's essays are interesting more for their circumstances than for what they have to say. As a preeminent, sanctioned East German writer before reunification, she was called on to accept state prizes galore, to award others, to pay birthday tributes to fellow members of the GDR's Writers' Union. The addresses obligated by these occasions have a welcome intimacy—the hallmark of Wolf's best fiction—but also a lot of fancy dancing to do. The earliest address here, from 1964, has Wolf playing simple Leninist parrot (``For art, the advantages of our society lie in the fact that by nature it is in tune with the objective laws of social development, with the objective interests of human beings''). She then has to move off that ``objective'' certainty to a 1987 plea for readmission to the Writer's Union of a number of banned, exiled writers as East Germany's ``advantages'' start to disappear like a mirage. To admirers of Wolf's fiction (most recently, What Remains), watching the ways in which an official writer must posture is a discomforting, even appalling spectacle. What ultimately seems to save Wolf here are a pair of appreciations of Max Frisch—the greatest German-speaking writer of his time, and a skeptical Swiss to boot. Wolf knows everything that makes Frisch major; and beneath her texts plays an honest agony, an inability to reconcile the utopian, then-calcified, myths of her own public life with the equally conscience-ridden doubts of the free man Frisch. These pieces exhibit a zeal for truth in Wolf that makes her trimming all the more grotesque. And doubtlessly self-painful, and thus touching.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-12302-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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