Thought-provoking essays that offer more than mere opinion, as the author plumbs the writers’ philosophical and...
Nobel and Booker Prize winner Coetzee (The Schooldays of Jesus, 2017, etc.) offers another collection of reflective and erudite essays on a variety of poets and novelists.
Originally published as introductions to foreign translations or in the New York Review of Books, some of the author’s favorites recur: Daniel Defoe, Robert Walser, Zbigniew Herbert, Philip Roth, and Samuel Beckett, the “philosophical satirist,” whom Coetzee covers in four of the essays. While discussing Beckett’s letters and two novels—Watt, a “fable cum treatise that for long stretches manages to be hypnotically fascinating,” and Molloy, a “mysterious work, inviting interpretation and resisting it at the same time”—the author focuses on Beckett’s language, a “self-enclosed system, a labyrinth without issue, in which human beings are trapped.” An acclaimed translator himself, Coetzee is particularly interested in the translations of some authors’ works. He laments that any translation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther that would be “true” for readers of the 1770s as well as for today’s is “an unattainable ideal.” He quibbles that Michael Hamburger’s translations of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry are “only intermittently…touched with divine fire.” But the “achievement is nevertheless considerable.” The essay on Patrick White, the “greatest writer Australia has produced,” confronts the dilemma faced by literary executors. Coetzee praises White’s agent Barbara Mobbs as well as Kafka’s friend Max Brod for refusing to carry out their authors’ wishes to have their writings destroyed. As Coetzee writes, “the world is a richer place now that we have [White’s] The Hanging Garden.” As a longtime advocate for animal rights, his short piece on Juan Ramón Jiménez’s tale of a donkey, Platero and I, is especially poignant. Other subjects of Coetzee’s probing eye include Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Heinrich Von Kleist, Antonio Di Benedetto, Les Murray, Gerald Murnane, Irène Némirovsky, Ford Madox Ford, and Hendrik Witbooi.
Thought-provoking essays that offer more than mere opinion, as the author plumbs the writers’ philosophical and psychological depths.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2391-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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