A fine addition to an important body of work that looks more and more Nobel-worthy as the years pass.
Sharp insights abound in this gathering of 11 closely related essays on fictional technique and the attitudes underlying it, by the eminent Peruvian-born author of such contemporary classics as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982) and The Feast of the Goat (2001).
This is ostensibly a series of letters to a fledgling novelist (about whom we learn precisely nothing), who’s doubtless a fictional device himself. Vargas Llosa amiably pours forth, nevertheless, the wisdom accumulated during a lifetime of writing, reading, and thinking about the impulse toward literary creation (“. . . a deep dissatisfaction with real life . . .”), the roots of fiction in each writer’s own life and opinions, and specific problems of creating and balancing form and content, as solved by such masters as Flaubert, Melville, Faulkner, and fellow Latin Americans Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Alejo Carpentier. The finest chapters are those in which Vargas Llosa addresses specific technical issues by analyzing relevant classic texts: e.g., the differences between chronological and psychological time as expressed in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Joyce’s Ulysses, and Mexican Augusto Monterroso’s hilarious single-sentence masterpiece, “The Dinosaur”; relationships between the real and the fantastic in James’s The Turn of the Screw and Woolf’s Orlando; and “Chinese box” construction” as perfected in The Thousand and One Nights and Don Quixote. If he actually exists, Vargas Llosa’s “young novelist” is fortunate indeed to profit from such lightly worn learning. If he doesn’t, the rest of us can be grateful for this relaxed tour through the provinces of the fiction-maker’s imagination. And the general reader will be happy to be pointed toward such comparatively little-known watershed works as João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Juan Carlos Onetti’s A Brief Life, and the enchanting medieval epic Tirant lo Blanc.
A fine addition to an important body of work that looks more and more Nobel-worthy as the years pass.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11916-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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