Fractured but elegant musings on dying and, most poignantly, living.
Last words and images from the Nobel Prize–winning writer.
In this posthumous collection, Grass (1927-2015) offers brief, gentle, intimate meditations illustrated by his own soft pencil drawings. Some pieces look back with nostalgia and even surprise at the author’s past. Discovering more than 200 drawings and watercolors that he made when he was an art student, he feels “amazed” and searches his memory “trying to find the young man in his early twenties” who was passionate about craft. He recalls his start as a writer, “setting down words early on,” excited when he received an Olivetti typewriter, “sleek and elegant in form, as if Leonardo da Vinci had invented the typewriter on the side.” Even in the age of computers, Grass remained true to his Olivetti, stocking up on ribbons that became increasingly scarce. In many pieces, the author considers the losses that come with old age: his senses of taste and smell, the pleasures of a woman’s breasts, and teeth, reduced to only one, “single, who wants to show how stalwart he is.” A poem entitled “Self Portrait” begins, “Old codger, chewer of gums / fit for nothing but spooned pap.” Lost, too, was the ability to travel, and Grass was reduced to tracing a finger on a map. “It’s hard to let go,” he writes. “Some things are easier / others give rise to howls of complaint.” He complains, for example, about a world in which some favorite foods are considered offensive—e.g., pig’s kidneys, breaded brains, beef liver. His children exclaim “Sickening!” when he reprises the flavors of his past. Of the few benefits of old age, the lessened need for sleep is one: “sleep,” he remarks, “is a waste of time.” He and his wife decided to have their coffins made, discussing shape, wood, and types of handles with a master carpenter. When the finished products arrived, they had “our trial lie-in,” and then, he writes, “life went on as usual.”
Fractured but elegant musings on dying and, most poignantly, living.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-78538-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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
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