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| 1542018951
| 9781542018951
| B086X2Z6RB
| 4.28
| 3,592
| Nov 03, 2020
| Nov 03, 2020
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really liked it
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Jul 24, 2021
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| 0395745853
| 9780395745854
| 0395745853
| unknown
| 3.27
| 11
| Oct 01, 1995
| Jan 01, 1995
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[Written for the Boston Globe September 1995] Contemporary literary theorists sometimes assail memoirists with the charge that they are forcing the mes [Written for the Boston Globe September 1995] Contemporary literary theorists sometimes assail memoirists with the charge that they are forcing the messiness and complexity of life into too simple and neat a package, making linear narrative out of what is really only the spattering of a billion random moments. Writers of memoirs have also been subject to a variety of other charges: that their choosing to include this and leave out that tilts the work in favor of their own ego or politics; that they do not sufficiently account for the distortion of time; that, in writing so blatantly about themselves, they begin with the presumption that their lives or stories hold some special interest so we are justified in suspecting them, from the very start, of a combination of narcissism and exhibitionism. Still, the form lives on and, in hands as capable as Douglas Allanbrook's, can make for wonderful reading. Perhaps the advantage of the memoir rises out of the very shortcomings mentioned above: it erases some of the messiness of life so that we can see it for the remarkable thing it is; it enables a writer to say, this happened to me, or around me, or through me, and it is work remembering -- even in modified or imperfect shape. Allanbrook's superb memoir, SEE NAPLES, is about the Allied campaign in Italy in 1943 and 1944, about Allanbrook's part in the war, and, to a lesser extent, about his affection for and involvement in things Neapolitan. It is written by a musician with no previous books to his credit, from a distance of 50 years, and yet it strikes such an honest and appreciative string of notes that it will likely resonate in the minds of readers who have not the slightest interest in things military or Neapolitan. The book beings in 1951, and moves backward and then forward in time. When we first meet Allanbrook, he is living on a Fulbright fellowship in the hills above Naples, composing a symphony and courting an Italian woman. With a deftness that would fill experienced writers with envy, he then plunges back into his combat experiences with a US Army infantry division, sketching characters from both worlds -- eccentric landladies, proud Italian families brought low by the war, informers, fascists, comrades in arms and fellow musicians. He has a great gift -- slightly overused in certain passages -- for moving effortlessly back and forth between different subjects and different periods. Discussing a friend he knows in the 1950s, he will slip back to a similar personality from his wartime days, forward to an associated event from later in his life, and back again in the space of a single paragraph. Many of these scenes and much of the book as a whole center around his loves -- consummated and otherwise. The strain of melancholy that plays through all this has the sound of lonely old age to it, but Allanbrook steers clear of self-pity. One of the book's many strengths is its author's tone -- almost jaunty in places, honest and raw, touched with real sadness and the real horror of combat, but viewing everything from an appreciative distance. He speaks of his musical talent ("genius" might be a better word, though he does not use it: A composer and pianist, Allanbrook is also considered to be one of the finest harpsichordists in America) without false modesty, of petty and stupid officers without apology, of his friends and lovers without sentimentality. This tone holds as he takes us from the happy postwar years back to his Army training, his unit's arrival in Morocco and its slow, bloody, sometimes absurd progress up the Italian peninsula. He deals frankly with wartime sex -- both hetero- and homosexual, the latter a rarity in military memoirs -- and gives the nonveteran an excellent feel for the pettiness and courage of officers, for the cold, smells and cruelty of wartime Italy, the alternating boredom and horror that is the infantryman's lot. German land mines, impromptu nightclubs, torturers, partisans, prostitutes, pimps, one freezing Apennine winter and a large and well-drawn cast of infantry soldiers -- all of this is mixed almost perfectly into a stew of history, philosophy, music and romance. Surprisingly perhaps, the story reaches its dramatic climax not during combat but immediately following the German surrender, when Sergeant Allanbrook and his cohorts are charged with the duty of returning truckloads of Russians to the Soviet authorities to face judgment and certain death. In the last two chapters, the book fades just a bit. I would have liked a more detailed return to the postwar years so well-depicted in the opening chapters, more about his Italian wife of 18 years -- who remains only a silhouette. Allanbrook's story is so engaging, and so engagingly told, that I wanted it to go on another 100 pages. The prose is strikingly smooth and natural, as in this description of a not-so-attractive section of southern Italy: "To enter one of these towns is desolation: a fly-bitten piazza with a dusty bar, the caribinieri headquarters, a few palazzi of a certain age, a disheveled church, and, all around, a honeycomb of squalid stone houses with, perhaps, on the outskirts (if their mayor has been able to finesse some funds from the cassa per il Mezzogiorno) rows of cement apartments facing out onto the desperate countryside." His love of music pervades the story without ever taking center stage. We see him entertaining his hosts or fellow warriors on both magnificent and broken-down pianos, studying a score in the desert, or next to a barracks craps game. SEE NAPLES is a memoir in classical form. It takes a purely personal view of an important piece of history, giving intimate glimpses of a life without ever allowing the shadows and flashes of private emotion to occlude the larger, more universally accessible vista. Finishing it, I found my understanding of my own life had been enhanced by Allanbrook's perspective, my regrets and small triumphs somehow conjoined with his. It seems likely to me that most readers of this finely- tuned work will have a similar experience -- which may, after all, be the purpose and value of setting one's remembrances into print. ...more |
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Dec 11, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0671738623
| 9780671738624
| 0671738623
| 3.47
| 1,367
| Jan 01, 1994
| May 01, 1995
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[Written for the Philadelphia Inquirer April 1994] "I have come to the conclusion that I don't believe in relationships, pets, or children," announces [Written for the Philadelphia Inquirer April 1994] "I have come to the conclusion that I don't believe in relationships, pets, or children," announces Bud, a character In Carrie Fisher's third novel. "People have them because they don't want to be alone, you know? They build this elaborate, intricate superstructure designed to ward off their loneliness. which is a fantasy, 'cause you're alone at the end anyway, right? Either in pain or hallucinating or whatever." This is not an especially original observation, not as cleverly stated as some of the other comments offered by this same character, and not as profound as some of the novel's subtler remarks on the human condition. But it's a good place to begin talking about DELUSIONS OF GRANDMA, because the book might best be described as an exploration of companionship. There is not a great deal said here about pets, but Fisher takes a close look at the sticky webs that connect lovers, friends, parents and children. In a novel sprinkled with puns, jokes and cute turns of phrase, she manages to tell a contemporary love story and to engage the reader in a fresh and quite serious discussion of the big questions: commitment, death, loneliness. The heroine of DELUSIONS OF GRANDMA is Cora, a successful, once-married screenwriter with a streetwise understanding of the Hollywood scene and an enviable band of friends. Her relationship with Ray, a likable lawyer, accounts for much of the plot. What accounts for much of the drama — low-key, realistic, and well-put-together drama — is a question: Will Cora and Ray navigate the tumbling currents of infatuation and sail into the calmer seas of a stable marriage? Or will one or both of them abandon ship before the cruise is truly underway? On the surface, there seems to be no obstacle to their mating for life, but Fischer is not satisfied with mere surfaces, glitzy and appealing as those surfaces may be. What sets this novel a cut above a run-of-the-studio romance, or even a sexy literary L.A. affair, is the author's penetration to the subtler, sneakier layers of pride and stubbornness, the almost invisible psychological reefs surrounding every safe romantic harbor. Cora is a talker, and her relationship with Ray begins not with exuberant sex but with exuberant conversation. While she is at work in Paris, she and her new lawyer friend carry on increasingly intimate and expensive transoceanic telephone conversations that prepare the soil for the seed of their togetherness. The seed sprouts nicely. Their early relationship features his kindness and her humor, comfortable sex, (described with a few deft strokes instead of the customary he-did-this, she-did-that choreography) and a gentle introduction to each other's histories. For a while their relationship grows strongly and smoothly, but Cora's quirky humor slowly begins to look like elusiveness, and Ray uses his moods to demand compensation for his unflagging generosity. Fisher guides the reader quickly through these stages, introducing an array of eccentric but believable Hollywood types reminiscent of the cast of Charlie Smith's CHIMNEY ROCK . The central couple is surrounded by directors and producers and fashion designers, people fond of the slap on the back, the phony smile, the eye for the rising star. But, again, beneath this glittering surface, the author hides something of substance. Cora might seem to be suffering from a simple fear of commitment, but there is more to her than that. Her friends turn out to be loyal friends — quirky, almost bizarre, but loyal — and she is loyal to them in return. Fisher introduces a young man with AIDS and takes us through his last weeks in a way that is as horrifying as it is beautiful. In the space of 20 pages, this man and his death are made vivid, and the tragedy shines a light into the inner recesses of everyone around him. Having dealt so fluently with love, death and friendship, the novel turns, in its final sections, to the mystery of the relations between parents and children. Cora's grandfather, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, is the object of a benign kidnapping from his nursing home, and, though this section leads nicely into an exploration of the relationship between mother and daughter, it feels slightly contrived, the book's one false step. In all, DELUSIONS OF GRANDMA is a deftly put-together piece of fiction that falls somewhere between the very serious and the very light and manages to avoid the pitfalls of both extremes: ponderous self-examination on the one hand, and easy cliché on the other. As In her previous novels, POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE and SURRENDER THE PINK, Carrie Fisher has some fun playing with the twists and turns of language; she provides some laughs, some food for thought, some tender moments. Cora's transcendence of her circumstances is the final lesson of the book, and it both encourages us and leaves us to decide for ourselves about the wisdom of believing or not believing in relationships. ...more |
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Dec 08, 2019
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| 0151790159
| 9780151790159
| 0151790159
| 2.89
| 9
| Apr 01, 1991
| Jan 01, 1992
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[Written for the Boston Globe August 1992] At one point in "Rose Reason," Mary Flanagan's third work of fiction (she is the author of "Trust," a novel, [Written for the Boston Globe August 1992] At one point in "Rose Reason," Mary Flanagan's third work of fiction (she is the author of "Trust," a novel, and "Bail Girls." a collection of stories), the heroine, Frances (a.k.a. Rose) Mullen, is told: "You are a good listener, Miss Mullen. You have not too strong an identity." This dubious compliment, and Frances' acceptance of it, are two of the many delicate beams of light Flanagan shines into the recesses of her main character's psyche. In fact, the entire novel is not so much a story as a subtle, many-faceted investigation of one woman's inner life. Without relying on a brisk, twisting plot (though there are some nice surprises) or a series of big scenes (though there is an abundance of fine small ones), Flanagan is able to make the reader a full and willing partner in this investigation, and to create, in "Rose Reason," a moving and psychologically precise work. The book begins with a sweet Maine childhood. Young Frances ice-skates, eats blueberries in milk and maple-sap icicles, listens to her parents dancing and laughing in the den late at night. But this idyllic existence is spoiled, first, glancingly, by the Korean War, and then, more profoundly, by the illness and death of Frances' mother. Her kindly father is easily overpowered by his steel-willed sisters, one of whom takes Frances to live with her in Maine's interior: "a melancholy place ... With its sandy soil and its scrub pines, its homogenous sky arid featureless horizon, it is like a land under a curse." Mary Flanagan's rendering of this accursed land forms a sturdy foundation of Frances' character and for the novel as a whole. The drudgery and danger of mill work, the power of local priests and local opinion, the ethnic rivalries, the small-town platitudes ("there's nothing like your own little place...no one like your own people") are wonderfully depicted. Frances is surrounded by people who seem to care for her, yet are actually caring for themselves through her, a pattern of abuse that will continue well into adulthood. Before she reaches puberty, her future has been mapped out in accordance with the wishes and narrow ambitions of others: she will lead a life of spinsterish servitude, teaching at the local Catholic school and doing good works. Trapped in this imposed identity, Frances begins to think of herself as "a performing animal" and "a little American smiler." always eager to please, to bend, to sacrifice. As she comes to understand, she has been "conditioned for servility," so it is natural that, when one of her aunts falls ill, she is thrust into the role of unpaid nurse. Her beloved, indecisive father remarries and fades from the scene. In an attempt to escape the prison being built around her, Frances takes the confirmation name "Rose," as if, by shedding her given name, she will shed as well all of Frances' pain and timidity. But just at the point where it seems Rose's spirit will be extinguished in this swamp of imposed duties and beliefs, she discovers in herself one spark of will and escapes her provincial prison for New York City. The vehicle for this escape is her first lover, Travis, and this pattern, too., will repeat itself throughout the novel. Just as we are about to lose hope for Rose and she seems about to lose hope for herself, she summons the courage to break free. And in almost every case. the impetus for these flights of liberation is a lover. Rose becomes obsessed with a series of them, surrendering herself in accordance with her conditioning. What she is chasing in each of these men is, of course, her true and unabridged individuality, but it takes her years - and most of the book - to search for it in the proper place. These love obsessions lead Rose into a bohemian life with a band of filmmakers in New York's Lower East Side, to a Greek island, to Italy and, finally, London. Always, though, the habit formed in small-town Maine haunts her: "Roles and poses: how they stick, stick, stick." In her travels, Rose attracts a new family of quirky characters, some of them duplicitous, some kind. Flanagan does a good job of capturing the happy poverty of the 1960s, the easy friendships. the spur-of-the-moment trysts and travels, a bit of the dirt and drugs. Here and there, the thoroughness with which she develops minor characters and insignificant events causes the novel to droop for a few pages or so. One or two of the supporting characters seem more like devices than real people, but these are small failings given the size of the cast and the real clarity and depth with which the major characters are presented. And, though none of the later environments quite matches the perfection of Flanagan's provincial Maine, they are all original creations, never clichés, never stale borrowings from someone else's books or travels. Rose's initial, wide-eyed take on Manhattan is especially fine. The tension in the novel arises directly out of our affection for Rose Mullen. It seems easier for the reader, as well as for Rose's friends and lovers, to appreciate her than for her to appreciate herself. We wait and hope for her to smash the shell of her earlier conditioning and emerge as a true woman, someone capable of staking her rightful claim to a piece of the world's joy. But, self-sacrificial almost to the end, she attaches herself to men who lie to her, leave her, play various mind games with her, to a woman friend who tells her, "You're my creation, cookie," to people who enforce and encourage her servility. Rose's rationalization for this behavior is: "People who are always good to you don't ever teach you anything," and this is the real lesson of the book, convincingly demonstrated. Flanagan is too mature a writer to spoil her subtle investigation with a pat climax: there is an epiphany, but it is as muted and modest as the Maine landscape. At the end of the story, we are left with a sense of having witnessed another person's inner life - frustrating at times, pitiable, admirable, a bit boring, spotted with pain and joy, but very real. "Rose Reason" is a courageous book, eschewing as it does most of the tricks of more meretricious, heavily-plotted fiction. Consistently engaging and devoid of bitterness, it asks the reader to forego the titillation of a glamorous plot in exchange for something subtler, more mysterious, and in the end, much more valuable. ...more |
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| 0820324159
| 9780820324159
| 0820324159
| 4.22
| 40
| 1991
| May 06, 2002
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[Written for the Philadelphia Inquirer June 1991] "Just when you thought it safe to come out of hiding," a Midwestern critic wrote recently, "along com [Written for the Philadelphia Inquirer June 1991] "Just when you thought it safe to come out of hiding," a Midwestern critic wrote recently, "along comes another Vietnam book." It would be a shame if this kind of attitude were applied to John Balaban's memoir, REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE. In the first place, the reductive term "Vietnam book," is not much more accurate than, say, "love book," or "human book." There are as many ways to write about a place, or a subject, as there are authors, and only a kind of intellectual or emotional indolence would move someone — a critic, especially — to dismiss a book simply because of its subject matter. In the second place, Balaban has written a stirring, thought-provoking, and strikingly original memoir, an adventure of conscience that challenges, educates, entertains and inspires. Balaban went to Vietnam as a conscientious objector. Here again, however, that label seems grossly inaccurate. He was a CO who packed a .38; who, during the 1968 Tet offensive, guarded a provincial hospital with a machine gun; who used fists and metal chairs on scurrilous street punks; who befriended soldiers and CIA agents, and spent as much time in Viet Cong-controlled areas as some combatants. His strange odyssey began in 1967. Distressed, like many college students of that time, by America's involvement in Vietnam, Balaban chose a course of action not very popular among his contemporaries: He traded in his student deferment and went to Vietnam as a noncombatant Volunteer. "It occurred to me," he writes, "that the only place to learn anything, to do anything about Vietnam was in Vietnam." The first hundred pages of REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE tell the story of Balaban's first eight months in Vietnam, teaching linguistics with the International Voluntary Services (IVS) at a university in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho. Smoothly, often poetically, Balaban takes us beyond the war and into the gaiety and turbulence of the country's soul. Here is a scene from a riverside market: "All about, as we passed through the fish stalls in search of the spice section, our shoes picking up glittery scales, blood-flecked leaves, and scraps of entrails, I could make out ...'Americans' rising from the peasant hubbub above the racket of the amplified radio, the clacking sticks of soup vendors, the fruit sellers' chants, the shine of a knife sharpener's wheel, a lone flute song, and the cries of various monkeys, finches, canaries, lorikeets, and kingfishers caged for sale. We passed buckets of snakes, tubs of turtles; walked through the meat section where pig halves knotted with mushy fat and stringy haunches of beef hung from hooks in on orbit of green flies. I paused as a woman butcher raised her cleaver and brought it down lopping off a piece of pork, then wrapped it up in some military newspaper with a fuzzy front-page photo showing Viet Cong bodies lying, disemboweled, on an empty roadway." This first, best section of the book ends with Balaban doing guard and orderly duty at the local operating room at the height of the Tet offensive. His account of the fighting, during which Balaban was wounded, is as gripping as any thriller, and the horrifying descriptions of civilian casualties serve as a proper foundation for the rest of the book. Here and there, Balaban's writing suffers small lapses, usually when he loses faith in his descriptive abilities and thumps the reader with superfluous sentences. "We were stunned," or "I was in a real fix." Once or twice his objectivity is strained by phrases like "inimitable, ignorant, American savagery," and occasionally his philosophical musings seem repetitive. But these are small specks of dust on a marvelous canvas that captures not only the horror of wartime Vietnam, but also its humor, irony, courage, craziness, corruption, decadence and day-to-day life. Floating beneath all this, never far from the surface, is Balaban's highly developed sense of moral outrage. After Tet, this outrage drew him away from IVS and into an organization called the Committee of Responsibility, which arranged for severely wounded Vietnamese children to be brought to America for medical treatment. Balaban's account of these children's suffering, of the bureaucratic obstacles to their temporary emigration, of the swampy moral ground he stumbled into while trying to wrest something unblemished from the war's devastation, is unsparingly honest. Interspersed with the wrenching case histories of these child victims are sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous accounts of Balaban's personal life. After his alternative service ended, Balaban came back to America, where he endured much the same sense of dislocation suffered by combat veterans. In August 1971, with his pregnant wife in tow, Balaban returned to Vietnam to research ca dao, Vietnamese folk poetry. "At this point in my experience with the war. I saw collecting these poems and translating them as the only sensible political act I could perform," he writes. Here, and in the final section when he visits poverty-stricken Hanoi and, farther south, seeks out and finds some of the people saved 15 years earlier by the Committee of Responsibility, we probe deeper and deeper layers of Balaban's affection for Vietnam, his anger at war, and, finally, his sadness at the strictures of Vietnam's postwar communism. REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE is a superb book. Part internal exploration, part historical treatise, part travelogue, part political statement, it marks the reader with the indelible print of a writer of conscience who dared, in the words of a Vietnamese poem, to "go out and see Heaven's face." ...more |
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Nov 26, 2019
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| 0374280665
| 9780374280666
| 0374280665
| 3.33
| 6
| Feb 1994
| Jan 01, 1994
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[Written for the Boston Globe February 1994] Much of what we know of life in Haiti comes from the television news. We sit in clean, heated living rooms [Written for the Boston Globe February 1994] Much of what we know of life in Haiti comes from the television news. We sit in clean, heated living rooms with full bellies and watch 20-second clips of impossibly crowded lifeboats running aground on the Florida coast. If the food processor isn't making too much noise, or if the kids aren't fighting, or if we aren't engaged in reading a magazine at the same time, we may hear the correspondent offering a few words about the living conditions that prompt people to risk their lives on the open sea. Haitian Boat People, we title the story in our minds, and after a moment of compassion we are on to the next story, to Somalia or Bosnia or the latest sports scores. Unless we stop paying attention to the news altogether, stop watching TV, stop reading, we are continually confronted with such terrible accounts - domestic and foreign. Our pity is overtaxed, and sometimes, understanding the impossibility of changing most of these situations, we throw up our hands and retreat into apathy or cynicism or a frenzy of diversion. It is too much. There is nothing I can do. People are suffering everywhere - even in my own city, my own home. One of the great benefits of serious fiction is that it pushes us beyond these sound-bite accounts of the suffering and triumph of our fellow human beings. In this harried age, when we are assaulted by bits and bytes of information, when we read reviews and believe we understand the book, or scan headlines and talk about them as if we know the story, a good novel serves the purpose of requiring us to operate on a deeper level. It forces us to take some time with a situation, to probe its contradictions and complexities. It makes it more difficult to quickly label an issue and set it aside. As Martin Buber said: "Label me and you negate me." Anne-Christine d'Adesky's strong debut novel, "Under the Bone," performs the great service of making it impossible for us to label and negate Haitian life. Her knowledge of the conditions there is thorough and startling. She knows the languages spoken, the customs and religions, the foods, smells, politics, history, the climate of unending terror, and she manages to weave all these things into her story without making her characters into mere mouthpieces for a political cause. "Under the Bone" has a very lifelike texture to it. From killing fields to kitchen table, d'Adesky uses detail to bring daily Haitian life into focus for us, We see dates scrawled on a filthy prison wall, a man stirring coffee with his finger, the false drawer in a sympathetic lawyer's office, a girl finding wormy mangoes on the road and devouring them. We hear the buses and the gunshots. We smell decaying corpses and charcoal fires and sweat. Her numerous characters speak in believable voices, and the story itself unfolds in a loose fashion, closer to the way real life proceeds than to the usual tight progression of novelistic time. D'adesky has the gift of rendering ordinary scenes with such a fine balance of dialogue and description that the reader is totally surrounded by the fictional moment. Such unadulterated realism may be a problem for those who approach a novel expecting a linear plot replete with climax and sweet denouement. There is not one neat story line here, but several messy ones: an American working for a human rights organization who has come to Haiti to research the histories of imprisoned women; a labor organizer on the lam from the police who have tortured him; a young woman imprisoned for finding and reporting a corpse that no one was supposed to find or report; a guilty former army officer stumbling through his confession. There are happy scenes, as well, dinners and parties, and some humor. Scattered among the narrative chapters are letters and faxes, dreams and feverish delusions, even a wonderful scene from a play, written by one of the book's characters. What d'Adesky is attempting here is not so much to construct a plot as to paint for us a detailed picture of the whole of Haitian life. It is as if we watched a half minute news report about exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and decided to go to the library and spend a few days reading everything we could find on this poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Or, more accurately, it is as if we traveled to Haiti ourselves, with a French- and Creole-speaking guide who took us on a tour of city and countryside and introduced us to sadistic army captains and brave female physicians, to senators, poor country girls and dignified chauffeurs. For the most part, d'Adesky's prose is smooth and well-suited to her task. Very occasionally she loses faith in her abilities and gives the reader an unnecessary pointer: "He shifted his weight back and forth; he was visibly uncomfortable." Or, "Outside, Leslie knew, the other guards stood with their weapons drawn as well. The atmosphere here and in the courtyard was intense." And some of Leslie's sexual fantasies and loneliness, while adding a realistic touch, don't blend well with the novel's tone: "Why did she always fixate on completely unavailable people? It was the question that had dominated her therapy." These slips, however, are infrequent and do little damage. Finishing "Under the Bone," the reader shares some of the terrible sadness that shrouds Haiti, and feels some guilt at the role of the world's richer governments, including our own, in creating this sad place. More important, we feel we have penetrated the crusty surface of cliche and looked deeply into another, very different, society, into other lives. In her first novel, Anne-Christine d'Adesky has had the courage to address a difficult and important subject and has brought it to life in a manner far beyond the capabilities of television news and newspaper stories. "Under the Bone" is a brave and well-crafted work, cut from a solid block of despair. ...more |
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| 0099338718
| 4.06
| 277
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[Written for the Philadelphia Inquirer May 1992] Nina Berberova's autobiography, THE ITALICS ARE MINE, begins in St. Petersburg a decade before the Rus [Written for the Philadelphia Inquirer May 1992] Nina Berberova's autobiography, THE ITALICS ARE MINE, begins in St. Petersburg a decade before the Russian Revolution and takes the reader on a profound historical, literary and personal journey through the first half of the 20th century. In the course of this journey, we are provided with descriptions of czarist and post-revolutionary Russia. Europe between the wars, wartime Paris, and 1950s America. We form an intimate acquaintance with the Russian émigré community in Europe in the '20s, '30s and '40s — especially its poets and artists. With Berberova, the émigré Russian poet, critic and novelist whose collection of stories, THE TATTERED CLOAK, was published in English to much acclaim last year, we live through poverty and fear, through times of real hunger and mild debauchery, through two marriages and friendships with a great assortment of soulful and unsavory men and women. By the time the story ends, in New York City in mid-century, we have experienced a remarkable life stripped of sentimentality, a life enriched by a preference for intensity over happiness and sincerity over comfort. Nina Berberova, who is now 91 and lives in Philadelphia, begins her story with a childhood full of ordinary wonders. Quickly, though, this ordinariness is transformed — first by the force of her unique personality, then by revolution and civil war. As she says: "At ten I was an ordinary child, played games, tried to avoid homework, got punished, stood in a corner picking at the wall plaster. ...Yet a constant thought ran parallel to this — I am a poet. I want to be friends with poets; I want to read poetry." Uprooted by the Russian Revolution and civil war, the Berberova family moves south to Rostov, then north again to Moscow and Petersburg. Nina's love of poetry grows steadily during these lean years, and as a young adult in Petersburg, she begins what will be a lifelong association with the luminaries of Russian verse. In 1921 she is accepted into the Poets Union. Shortly thereafter, she marries the poet and man of letters V.F. Khodasevich, and together they leave their troubled homeland for points west. The summer of 1922 is a time of mass emigration for the Russian intelligentsia, and Khodasevich and Berberova quickly become part of a circle of émigrés living in Europe. The bulk of THE ITALICS ARE MINE concerns itself with this changing group of poets and artists condemned to the role of perpetual outsiders, forced to watch from afar as their friends at home are imprisoned, tortured and executed in the name of social progress. Some members of this large cast of characters will be familiar to the American reader — Nabokov, Gorky, Akhmatova. Others were of less enduring international reputation. But Berberova brings all of them to life, always fascinated by their literary achievements and vision, but never letting genius or reputation obscure ordinary weaknesses and quirks. Here is the real strength of this book — Berberova's insistence on taking nothing at face value. She lived through extraordinary times with extraordinary people but is somehow able to paint everything she sees and everyone she knows, in such honest and intricate detail it becomes accessible to us, almost familiar. There is no sentimentality, no adulation, no one-sided view, of famous writers or famous events. Cleverly, by depicting the world around her in such unsparing detail, Berberova gives us an intimate — if discreet — portrait of herself, as well. The woman who emerges is independent, yet tightly linked to her circle of friends; strong, yet capable of compromise; generous and sociable, yet protective of her solitude. At one point, she describes her life this way: "There was physical and emotional endurance, there was a profession, financial independence, there was success, initiative and freedom in love and friendship and the know-how of making a choice. But there was also submission to a man — with joy." Submission to a man (in another place she calls it "adjustment ")is something Berberova makes a point of recommending. Yet, when the relationship with Khodasevich deteriorates, it is she who ends it and goes to live on her own. Through years and years of poverty, she clings faithfully to the literary life, helps others, relies on the help of others. She alludes to affairs, she tries desperately to save Khodasevich's second wife from the Gestapo, and fails. She escapes strafing and bombardment and despair, nurses ill friends, supports herself by sewing and secretarial work and — with increasing success — writing. Most poignantly, perhaps, she and her colleagues endure the silence of the world's great writers while Stalin is murdering people like Isaac Babel. Europe was not especially hospitable to Russian émigrés in those years, and Berberova does not shy away from depicting personal and bureaucratic cruelty, pettiness and greed, both within her community and outside it. By 1950, most of her closest friends have died or moved away, and Berberova makes the decision to leave for the United States. She arrives in New York with $75 in her pocket, unable to speak English. But there. too, as she has done In Berlin and Paris, she lives modestly, relies on the generosity of friends, immerses herself in travel and books, and sculpts something wonderful from rough and ordinary clay. Berberova calls THE ITALICS ARE MINE an autobiography, but she mixes in doses of philosophy and history, lengthy portraits, journal entries, letters, verse and literary analysis. Written in Russian, and translated by Philippe Radley into fine, flowing English, this book should he welcomed by lovers of Russian and European history and letters, but also by anyone interested in the well lived life, in courage and perseverance and friendship, in the dynamic interface between art and politics. THE ITALICS ARE MINE is one of those rare and beautiful works that transcend their genre, posing as the story of one life, but offering, through the lens of that life, a penetrating insight into the human condition. ...more |
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| Jan 01, 1998
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[From an NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED segment entitled "You Must Read This" September 2011) In 1985, when I was in the midst of a 12-year struggle to writ [From an NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED segment entitled "You Must Read This" September 2011) In 1985, when I was in the midst of a 12-year struggle to write my first novel, I had the good fortune to be invited to the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony in Austerlitz, N.Y., for a monthlong residency. There, in the colony's curved-roof barn, I happened to pick up a paperback copy of Robert Stone's 1981 novel, A FLAG FOR SUNRISE. I had not yet heard of Robert Stone, but the precision of his language hooked me from the book's first sentence. It introduces us to a missionary priest at a bleak outpost in Tecan, a fictional Central American nation on the verge of a revolutionary uprising. Stone begins the story with this: "Father Egan left off writing, rose from his chair and made his way — a little unsteadily — to the bottle of Flor de Cana which he had placed across the room from his desk." That line drew me into a world of treachery and faith, and the book became for me, in those four weeks and afterward, a master class on the art of making a novel. Since then, I've read A FLAG FOR SUNRISE at least five times, taught it in college courses, and recommended it to countless friends and conference-goers. It has everything I care about in a novel: fresh, gorgeous prose; a vivid setting; an array of original characters. But what matters most to me is the way Stone manages to weave big ideas seamlessly into his story — ideas about politics and religion and history and addiction; about that old, good thing, the meaning of life. In the midst of Tecan's political upheaval, its fictional people struggle to find that meaning, or abandon the struggle and indulge their basest instincts. The radical nun turns out to have a saintly compassion for the oppressed, while the Guardia officer — who suspects her, lusts after her, and ultimately takes her to the torture cells — displays an almost pure evil. But they and the cast of characters that lie between these two on the moral spectrum — an alienated American anthropologist, a fervent revolutionary, a soulless arms dealer, a treacherous businessman and spy, a lascivious yachtswoman — are beautifully crafted. The book, a kind of literary velvet, has both weight and texture, exactly what I was trying for in those early days, and what I'm still working toward — in Stone's shadow — 10 novels later. I'm a fan of all Robert Stone's work, but A FLAG FOR SUNRISE stands tallest on the shelf for me. I still go back to it at times when I want to re-experience the power created by a combination of elegant prose and a profound consideration of the human predicament. Perhaps my favorite line in all of literature comes when Father Egan is asked why he's stopped saying his daily office. "I consider it wrongly written down," says the hard-drinking priest. First line to last, I consider A FLAG FOR SUNRISE correctly written down, a masterful literary thriller that helps us appreciate the moral complexity that is the living of a human life. ...more |
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