Food for thought and argument, invitations to widen the scope of one’s own reading. A fine addition to Parks’s rapidly...
A lively collection of 19 generally stimulating book reviews and literary pieces, most of which appeared in the New York Review of Books, by the prolific British novelist (Destiny, 2000, etc.), memoirist (An Italian Education, 1995, etc.), and essayist (Adultery and Other Diversions, 1999, etc.)
Parks, who lives and teaches in Verona, displays his credentials as a knowledgeable Italophile in the rich title essay, a review of Robert Hollander’s new translation of Dante’s Inferno that expertly analyzes the great poem’s virtuosic blending of history, theology, and literary artifice and offers a crisp comparative survey of earlier English versions. He also considers a biography of the 19th-century poet, idler, and hypochondriac Leopardi (“Surviving Giacomo”); Sicilian Giovanni Verga’s harshly naturalistic tales (“A Chorus of Cruelty”); the unconventional cultural nexus that embraced such great modernists as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and poet Umberto Saba (“Literary Trieste”); and, in the most probing of these essays, the life of futurist painter Mario Sironi (“Fascist Work”). The intricacies and pitfalls of literary translation (another skill Parks has mastered) are a frequent subtopic and take center stage in “Different Worlds,” which speculates intriguingly on the truism “that the same text can be so radically different in two different languages.” Elsewhere, Parks analyzes such modern classics as Henry Green’s under-appreciated novel Party Going (with its “marvelous fizz of shenanigans,” Dino Buzzati’s eerie allegory, The Tartar Steppe, and Jorge Luis Borges’s enchantingly fluid and learned nonfiction essays. Incisive reviews of current fiction (including Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, and José Saramago’s Blindness) are balanced by such pleasant surprises as his thoughtful review of Jay Neugeboren’s moving book about his brother’s schizophrenia (“In the Locked Ward”) and a pungent explication of British anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s theory of “schismogenesis,” which attempts to explain “strong personality differentiation within an overall group ethos.”
Food for thought and argument, invitations to widen the scope of one’s own reading. A fine addition to Parks’s rapidly growing oeuvre.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-610-4
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
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
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