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 pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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