This is the third volume of ``nonfiction'' from the prolific Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet (Absence, 1990), who often takes the writing life as subject. Handke delights in stretching his work across genres. Novels begin as screenplays, journal entries frequently record things as he'd have liked them to happen. Narration and description become interchangeable, as do representation and realization. Again, in these three essays, he toys with readers. ``Tiredness'' opens with the simplistic image of the little boy in church forcing his parents to take him home because he's tired, thus ruining the rest of their day. By the essay's end, some 40 pages later, that banal tiredness has taken on familial, erotic, political, and cultural dimensions. He describes a world slowed down, paid attention to, much as it might appear in a drug-induced state. Paragraphs stretch five pages or longer, contributing to the tedium. The final essay, ``The Successful Day,'' is also based on the mundane. Throwing an experience common to his audience back in their faces, he forces chuckles and all-out laughter as digressions become avoidances. Both these essays take the form of mock interviews, permitting him to play devil's advocate with himself. The longer title essay is harder to follow. His physical landscape is unfamiliar, and in constant flux. His subject is boredom itself: Staying in an insipid small town, the writer puts off sitting down at his desk by aimlessly searching for a jukebox like the one that filled his childhood. The joke here, of course, is that Handke is writing all this, accomplishing something the reader is not. This volume is a philosophical exercise by a mind taking multiple detours. Readers who lack the author's deadpan humor will stare blank-eyed at the page. They can't win. Handke has them precisely where he wants them.
Pub Date: Aug. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-18054-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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