Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic.
An ethereal collection of memories, delicately rendered before their inevitable crumbling away.
In 31 short vignettes, Erpenbeck (Kairos, 2023, etc.) grasps at hazy recollections that cumulatively form a body of work akin to an abstract mosaic. Each two-page section focuses on a particular fixation: One recalls construction at her son’s preschool, another celebrates prewar coal stoves, and another considers Berlin’s sanitation workers and the heirlooms they encounter while disposing of the city’s trash. An underlying sense of helplessness pervades as Erpenbeck attempts to concretize these recollections into something lasting. But “there’s so much to inherit these days,” she laments, “so many memories, it’s just too much to bear.” While some stories feel like futile attempts at archiving a personal history, others seek to accept the unavoidable losses of forgetting. “The farewells are what I remember,” she writes of the death of a loved one. On the disappearance of a friend’s ex-husband, “It remains astonishing that thin air can sometimes have just as much weight as something that is really there.” Writing about New Year’s Eve, she thinks of time moving “backward and forward” and wants to “believe in the ethereal web, the floating landscape of time, whose paths run between birthdays, weddings, deaths, and other anniversaries, instead of between houses.” One curious story mourns the bastardization of the traditional Splitterbrötchen pastry. Erpenbeck dreams up an argument with a baker (“No! The whole roll looked different, it wasn’t layered!”) before reaching an ominous meditation. “For the first time,” she writes, “it strikes me that the word disappear has something active at its core, that there is a perpetrator in the word who makes things I know and cherish disappear: Dismantle, discard, disband, disparage, discredit, disembowel, disuse.” Erpenbeck leaves it to her readers to assemble these enigmatic fragments into a meaningful whole. Those who indulge her idiosyncratic prose will be rewarded, finding in this slim book a wistful record of memory and loss.
Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780811238113
Page Count: 96
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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