Goes where most of us will not go and returns with the dire details.
Novelist and travel writer Iyer (The Global Soul, 2000, etc.) visits and attempts to comprehend some of the most remote, romantic, impoverished, and/or legendary places on the globe.
The author’s own biography is about as international as it can be: born in London to Indian parents, he now lives in Japan and regularly visits his mother in California. He focuses here on contrast, irony, and mystery, arranging 17 pieces in three loose thematic groups—although they probably could have been grouped randomly to the same effect. His venues shift from mountaintops in California, Tibet, and Haiti to the impoverished streets of the Philippines and Cambodia, to Oman and Easter Island, where he greeted the millennium with his mother and tried to find a computer that could send his e-mail. Iyer is a master of the ironic detail, and in these pieces he is able to notice the very objects whose juxtaposition will nail shut the lid of his beautifully constructed metaphorical box. In a 1993 account of New Year’s in Ethiopia, for example, after noting the country’s dangers, he concludes with a quotation from a guidebook about the “champagne atmosphere” of Addis Ababa. The author excels as well at what might be called “snapshot exposition”: the ability to capture in a few swift images the entire milieu in which he finds himself. There are a few portraits of people (the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen), several pieces that seem to be primarily book reviews (including a sensitive and imaginative analysis of Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans), and some fairly traditional there-I-went-and-this-is-what-I-saw-and-this-is-how-it-made-me-feel narratives. Occasionally, the author fails to avoid the travel writer’s arrogance, as when he tells how other tourists don’t appreciate what he does. Such lapses are rare; slightly more frequent is a tone of sadness akin to despair.
Goes where most of us will not go and returns with the dire details.Pub Date: April 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41506-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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