Dare we suggest that Coetzee is actually a better critical essayist than a novelist? This trenchant, rewarding volume...
Issues of political and moral choice and commitment and of literary theory and practice are considered in the South African Nobel laureate’s fourth collection of criticism.
Gathered here are 16 book reviews, four summary “introductions” to new translations or editions of major writers’ works and a single celebration of a “classic” film (“Arthur Miller, The Misfits”), which appeared in the anthology Writers at the Movies. Coetzee’s great strength is his sure sense of form—notably displayed in a meticulous deconstruction of Philip Roth’s “dystopian” alternate-history novel The Plot Against America and a stringent explication of enfolded levels of irony and self-deception in Coetzee’s countrywoman Nadine Gordimer’s subtle political novel The Pickup. He also does his homework, assiduously. A wealth of painstakingly absorbed historical and biographical information enriches his dissections of scholar-critic Walter Benjamin’s “the Arcades Project” (an encyclopedic analysis of Parisian social life “under capitalism”); Günter Grass’s challenging historical novel Crabwalk (based on a maritime disaster which has spawned numerous conflicting treatments of its details and significance); and the recently rediscovered fiction of 20th-century Hungarian author Sándor Márai, both a bold critic of fascism and a haughty apologist for an embattled aristocracy. Elsewhere, Coetzee pays due (if predictable) tribute to consensus European masters (Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Italo Svevo) and their less celebrated peers (Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, Hugo Claus), fellow Nobelists (Faulkner, Bellow, Naipaul), the underrated (Swiss miniaturist Robert Walser) and the unclassifiable (eclectic memoirist W.G. Sebald). Even middling essays on Whitman, Beckett and Graham Greene are redeemed by startlingly precise insights (e.g., that Greene’s “entertainment” Brighton Rock is energized by distinctions drawn between Good and Evil and Right and Wrong).
Dare we suggest that Coetzee is actually a better critical essayist than a novelist? This trenchant, rewarding volume suggests it just may be so.Pub Date: July 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-03865-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
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
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