Enjoy these short, meditative pieces slowly; Jaeggy is addictive.
Three sensuous minibiographies in light and shade.
This thin, almost pamphletlike book consists of three mesmerizing profiles of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and the French symbolist writer Marcel Schwob. Jaeggy (S.S. Proleterka, 2003, etc.) is a Swiss novelist who writes in Italian. Reading each brief essay is like taking a small wafer into your mouth and letting it dissolve so you can savor the flavor of the words, the images, and the moody atmosphere. These are hybrids: biography/literary criticism/prose poem. Eschewing the conventional, Jaeggy fashions poetic collages with facts, quotes, and re-created incidents that quietly reveal the inner souls of each author. She is particularly interested in matters of creativity and inspiration, madness and death. De Quincey, who became a “visionary” when he was 6, relied on opium and laudanum to stimulate his creativity, becoming “distant from the terrors of the living.” An “enigmatic sphinx,” he died at 74 “but seemed a boy of fourteen.” Schwob, who spoke three languages when he was 3, later took to using morphine. After a failed trip to Samoa to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, he returned home and locked himself in a house with his books. After he died, the “room smoked of grief.” The Keats piece is the longest and best. It begins: “In 1803, the guillotine was a common children’s toy.” Extremely bright, he “became the scribe and secretary to his mind” and forged friendships with Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Shelley (“lukewarm”), Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Before he died at the age of 25, Keats “spoke for hours in a lucid delirium [and]...never lost his faculties.” After his death, “they stripped the walls and floor and burned all of the furniture.” One of the only drawbacks of this book is its shortness. It would have been ideal if the publisher could have added additional essays.
Enjoy these short, meditative pieces slowly; Jaeggy is addictive.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2687-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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