Still, those planning a trip to the Louvre or a browsing tour through the stacks devoted to la belle France will find...
A most un-English embrace of all (well, most) things French by the noted English novelist (Love, Etc., 2001, etc.).
Barnes has a far more intimate knowledge of next-door-neighbor France than most of his famously insular (in more ways than one) compatriots, and for several reasons: “Both my parents taught French; I went to France with them on holiday; I read French at school and university; I taught for a year at a Catholic school in Rennes (where my gastronomic conservatism was unpicked); my favorite writer is Flaubert; many of my intellectual reference points are French; and so on.” These essays are an expression of his many enthusiasms, which are slightly more refined than those of one of his subjects, the historian Richard Cobb, who “preferred les petites gens both in his life and in his writing”; like Cobb, Barnes is at home among florists and bakers, parking attendants and small-town bankers, but his real loci are the likes of Monet and Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard and, yes, Gustave Flaubert, the subject of many of the pieces collected here. (Most were previously published in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.) About Flaubert, that great examiner of the bourgeois mind, Barnes is most illuminating, finding in his writings the qualities of “fluency, profligacy, range, and sexual frankness; to which we should add power, control, wit, emotion, and furious intelligence.” Barnes’s own writings here show many of those qualities, particularly intelligence and range, but those not familiar with allusive (and elusive) style and not already disposed to share his francophilia may find them arid at times, and perhaps even beyond the ken of all but the most sophisticated native.
Still, those planning a trip to the Louvre or a browsing tour through the stacks devoted to la belle France will find Barnes’s essays to be a worthy companion.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41513-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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