This is the third volume of ``nonfiction'' from the prolific Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet (Absence, 1990), who often takes the writing life as subject. Handke delights in stretching his work across genres. Novels begin as screenplays, journal entries frequently record things as he'd have liked them to happen. Narration and description become interchangeable, as do representation and realization. Again, in these three essays, he toys with readers. ``Tiredness'' opens with the simplistic image of the little boy in church forcing his parents to take him home because he's tired, thus ruining the rest of their day. By the essay's end, some 40 pages later, that banal tiredness has taken on familial, erotic, political, and cultural dimensions. He describes a world slowed down, paid attention to, much as it might appear in a drug-induced state. Paragraphs stretch five pages or longer, contributing to the tedium. The final essay, ``The Successful Day,'' is also based on the mundane. Throwing an experience common to his audience back in their faces, he forces chuckles and all-out laughter as digressions become avoidances. Both these essays take the form of mock interviews, permitting him to play devil's advocate with himself. The longer title essay is harder to follow. His physical landscape is unfamiliar, and in constant flux. His subject is boredom itself: Staying in an insipid small town, the writer puts off sitting down at his desk by aimlessly searching for a jukebox like the one that filled his childhood. The joke here, of course, is that Handke is writing all this, accomplishing something the reader is not. This volume is a philosophical exercise by a mind taking multiple detours. Readers who lack the author's deadpan humor will stare blank-eyed at the page. They can't win. Handke has them precisely where he wants them.
Pub Date: Aug. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-18054-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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