History and private life interfused utterly by a master writer in a way at once authentic, unpretentious, moving, and of...
Now that he alone of his immediate family is still alive, this remarkable German writer (The Invention of Curried Sausage, 1995, etc.) produces a group memoir that, with piercing intelligence, reawakens—and grieves over—a dreadful history.
Born in 1940 the youngest of three siblings, Timm calls himself “the afterthought” of the family, in deference to his brother, Karl-Heinz, 16 years Timm’s senior, a member at age 18 of the Death’s Head division of the SS, and dead of wounds near Kiev by late 1943. What now remains of this absent but loomingly significant older brother is only a small collection of personal items, among them a diary, kept daily during military action in Ukraine. Its omissions speak most loudly for Timm (“There is nothing about prisoners. . . . Why were they not worth mentioning?”), as does its thunderously understated final entry: “I close my diary here, because I don’t see any point in recording the cruel things that sometimes happen.” In the light of what those “cruel things” must have been, Timm, drawing on memory, family lore, and his own extensive reading, goes back into the history both of his family and of Germany itself from the 1920s on, refusing throughout to flinch, forgive, or meliorate. His father, a furrier in Hamburg, tried hard to keep up the appearance of well-being and status, but in the end, surviving into the 1950s and sinking into alcoholism, his was to be a “life that failed.” Equivalent memories of his dutiful mother and unmarried older sister strike the same note of effort, sorrow, and the unfulfilled. But above all looms the lost brother, an ever-present barrier between the surviving Timm and his grieving father, so that “my own existence was always called into question,” both by the brother as lost son, and by the brother as lost nation.
History and private life interfused utterly by a master writer in a way at once authentic, unpretentious, moving, and of extraordinary significance.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-10374-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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