Best suited to academics and those with a serious interest in Austrian literature.
The first English-language publication of two collections of essays by the noted German writer.
Published in German in 1985 and 1991, these scholarly essays were written while Sebald was pursuing a university career, before the publication of such unique blends of fact and fiction as Austerlitz and Vertigo. The pieces show their academic roots: Ranging from relatively well-known writers (Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Kafka) to those likely to be unfamiliar to English speakers (Adalbert Stifter and Charles Sealsfield), they are dense critical exegeses peppered with phrases such as “In this paper I will try to determine the nature of [Thomas] Bernhard’s political, moral, and artistic credo,” or “Names such as [Josef] Weinheber and [Karl Heinrich] Waggerl will suffice to demonstrate the idea of Heimat which persisted well into the 1960s.” Heimat, generally translated as homeland but also connoting a sense of belonging, is an important concept in these essays, or rather—unsurprisingly for Sebald, who spent most of his life as an expatriate—the loss of homeland and/or a feeling of being estranged from it. This notion comes across most powerfully in “A Kaddish for Austria,” on Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish writer who saw the Holocaust coming; and in “Westwards—Eastwards,” about the ambivalent feelings of Jews who left their shtetls for the cities of the Hapsburg Empire. Other themes Sebald discerns as running through Austrian literature from the late 18th century through the 20th include the destruction of nature, the inadequacy of science, psychiatry, and rationalism to completely understand human behavior, and, as translator Catling deftly puts it in the introduction, “the crises of consciousness and identity, particularly bourgeois identity.” In addition to the previously mentioned essays, one on Schnitzler and two on Kafka are of general interest, but most are likely too specialized for the average reader.
Best suited to academics and those with a serious interest in Austrian literature.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781400067725
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
