Not as agreeable as this season’s other Author Abroad memoir, Roland Merullo’s The Italian Summer (2009), but more rigorous...
As elegantly written and astutely observed as her fiction (Arlington Park, 2007, etc.), Cusk’s memoir describes looking at art and getting to know the locals from Tuscany to Naples.
The author and her husband sold their house in England, took their two daughters out of school and “decided to go to Italy, though not forever. Three months, a season, was as much of the future as we cared to see.” Cusk’s sharp wit is apparent even when perusing an Italian phrase book, “where Tony and Mario are forever ordering the appropriate coffee…and Marcella, in her loop of eternity, stands on a street corner in Verona asking Fabrizio for directions to the railway station.” She’s less appealing when bemoaning the physical ugliness of the modern world and snobbishly disdaining tourists who, like her, came to Italy to imbibe beauty. Just because these hapless folks stand in long museum lines—they hadn’t the foresight to book tickets ahead as Cusk did—and arrive in tour buses instead of in their own car, they aren’t necessarily incapable of appreciating Piero della Francesca or Raphael as much as the sensitive author. Still, Cusk’s assessments of art are wonderfully idiosyncratic, as is her analysis of Italian food: “soft and feminine…kind to children.” A cranky tour guide is preferable to a boring one, and except when dealing with the tourist hoi polloi, the author is sharp rather than nasty. Her account of a series of tennis matches brilliantly captures people’s personalities through their style of play, and her character sketches throughout are equally revealing. Husband and children are never named and deliberately left in vague outline, but we sense the family’s closeness and come to agree with Cusk that her daughters “have been formed, not bereaved,” by their sudden uprooting from everything familiar in their lives. Now they have their mother’s atmospheric account as a keepsake.
Not as agreeable as this season’s other Author Abroad memoir, Roland Merullo’s The Italian Summer (2009), but more rigorous and compelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-18403-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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