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versions of his novels, canvassed film archives, interviewed surviving friends, and combed through Puig’s abundant unpublished writings to construct a somewhat disheveled life-story befitting Puig’s motley existence.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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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