Invaluable not only for aficionados of contemporary Latin writing but also for scholars tracking film’s impact on serious...
An affectionately explicit biography of genre-bending Argentinean novelist Puig (1932–90), written by a translator and friend.
Levine (Spanish and Portuguese/Univ. of California) begins by reconstructing the small-town Argentinean world whose stifling boredom drove Puig’s mother Malé almost nightly to the movies with her precocious son. Romances and musicals provided the effeminate Puig with a dreamy exile from the machismo and homophobia that surrounded him on all sides in the outside world. His distaste for life in Péronist Argentina was reflected in his rocky rejection of his father Baldo. Levine’s candid use of Puig’s alternately discreet and graphic letters and conversation helps to describe the process by which Puig first became conscious of his homosexuality and eventually concluded that it was an unalterable part of himself. Handsome, volatile, and penny-pinching, Puig maintained a strict discipline in regard to his writing, which he practiced every day whether he was at home or on one of his increasingly frequent journeys abroad (usually in the company of his beloved mother). Levine demonstrates how such works as Puig’s autobiographical Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971) and his prison-cell melodrama Kiss of the Spider Woman (1979) recycle “the debris of mass culture”—newspaper soap serials, detective stories, B-movie plots, etc. In Puig’s world, characters never integrate emotion and sex into sustained adult relationships—much in the same way that Puig, fearful of aging without “a husband” despite international homage, never quite grappled with his own uneasy truths before his early (and somewhat suspicious) death from complications that arose after gallbladder surgery. Levine (The Subversive Scribe, 1991), who collaborated with Puig on English versions of his novels, canvassed film archives, interviewed surviving friends, and combed through Puig’s abundant unpublished writings to construct a somewhat disheveled life-story befitting Puig’s motley existence.
Invaluable not only for aficionados of contemporary Latin writing but also for scholars tracking film’s impact on serious revisionary literature. (b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-28190-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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