Eight not-so-new essays, as ingenious and exasperating as ever, by the late M. Barthes. These pieces, which date from 1964 to 1971, were originally published along with Le degré zéro de l'écriture in 1972. They add nothing of substance to the Barthesian canon (most are brief reflections on classic, or at least familiar, French authors, from La Rochefoucauld to Proust), but they provide a sampling of all that is most brilliant—and most dubious—in the work of the great Structuralist mandarin. For all his scientific pretensions (and his pedantic love of abstruse terms), Barthes was a poet. His style, to which translator Richard Howard does almost perfect justice, positively caresses the literary object with a sort of refined intellectual voluptuousness. (Discussing Pierre Loti's novel Aziyadé, Barthes savors "the sensuous, plump palatization of the y" in the title.) This uncanny sensitivity, along with his formidable analytical skills, makes Bartles an illuminating guide to things like Chateaubriand's Life of Rancé or the use of names in Proust. Still, what Barthes actually does with literature often seems irrelevant or downright destructive—less concerned with the text than with weaving interpretations around it. Aziyadé, he says, is an insipid novel—but the disjunction separating Julien Viaud (the author, a naval officer and world traveler), Pierre Loti (his pseudonym and literary self), and a second Loti (protagonist of the story) creates all kinds of opportunities for Structuralist gymnastics. This indifference to content in the traditional sense reminds one of nihilism, and in fact at one point Barthes observes that in literature, as in life, "there is ultimately nothing to understand." But still worse is Barthes' penchant for oracular utterances, often obscure (what is "a nascent schizophrenia, prudently formed in a homeopathic quantity"?) and always dogmatic ("antithesis is. . . a mechanism quite devoid of meaning"). This can lead, at best, to a string of thought-provoking dicta, but in any case it fails to leave the reader with a coherent view of the work in question.
Pub Date: July 1, 1980
ISBN: 0810126419
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1980
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
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
