Toibín expresses a companionable solace here, but at what a price. These artists create in him “an urge to have gay lives...
An exploration of gay sensibility in literature, read artfully between the lines and mapping emotional attachments.
Discerning the gay influence in literature where it is veiled in subtexts—“a hidden world of signs and moments, fears and prejudices”—is of critical importance as gay history becomes a vital element in gay identity, writes Toibín. Gays all too often “grow up alone; there is no history.” So it is hardly surprising that Tóibín, a gay man and celebrated novelist (The Blackwater Nightship, 2000, etc.), would find in literature an elemental aspect of that history and a way for him to reflect on his own preoccupations with secret erotic energy, sadness, tragedy, and with living fearlessly in a dark time. He has one eye trained at the edge of things, the other on the domestic conflation of worlds: Wilde’s family, he tells us, were Irish Protestants supporting the cause of Irish freedom, which “lifted them out of their circumstances and gave them astonishing individuality and independence”; Elizabeth Bishop was “a northern woman in the south”; Thomas Mann “combined the Brazilian roots of his mother and his father’s Hanseatic heritage”—sharp, flighty, steely, ethereal, distant, romantic. Themes recur and can be seen, for example, in the work of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who “plays with opposites and doubles and secret identities,” or in James Baldwin, whose writing “is bathed in the sadness which resulted” from an intelligence, wit, and longing that were battered by Baldwin’s being a black, gay man. Understanding such presences allows us, suggests Toibín, to understand the intensity of our response to an artwork by Francis Bacon, or to Mark Doty’s poems when news of being HIV-positive hits his lover.
Toibín expresses a companionable solace here, but at what a price. These artists create in him “an urge to have gay lives represented as tragic, an urge I know I should repress.”Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2944-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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