In this extraordinary memoir from 1932-1934, Kitty Crockett Robertson describes her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts during the Depression, a time when she, a Harvard graduate, became a hard-working apple farmer to save the family farm in Ipswich. Her physician father had died, and Kitty, wanting to keep the farm from being sold for development, which her Boston-based brothers favored, decided to give up her job working at the Harvard Library to try to make the orchard profitable enough to save the land. Working almost single-handedly, she spent the next two years doing all the dirty work, learning in the process that “The Depression was that time of leveling when she and her neighbors kept going on the strength they learned from each other.”
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Posted in 0: 2010 Reviews, Biographical/Autobiographical, Growing Up, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, 2010 reviews, Poland, Post World War II on Jul 5th, 2010
Set in 1963 in Wisla, the rural Polish town where author Jerzy Pilch himself grew up, A THOUSAND PEACEFUL CITIES feels as much like a real memoir as a satirical, fictional retelling of life in Poland in the years preceding the Student Revolt of 1968. In 1963, the Communist party is in power, and the country is under Soviet influence but not control. A strong, independent spirit and the residual respect of the populace for First Secretary Wladysaw Gomulka, who successfully challenged Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, has encouraged the populace to live as they have always lived, though economically they are becoming poorer. The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are still open and are a major part of life, not just in terms of religion but in the communities’ regular social gatherings. Under the increasing influence of the Soviets, however, Gomulka has become more dictatorial, imposing further limits on his people. At the outset of the novel, the reader immediately discovers that Jerzyk’s father and his father’s friend, Mr. Traba, an alcoholic former clergyman, plan to kill First Secretary Wladysaw Gomulka in Warsaw. What follows is a wild ride through rural Poland in 1963—a novel that is, by turns, hilarious, thoughtful, filled with metaphysical and dialectical argument, and embellished with lyrical details from the natural world.
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First published in English in 1981, and republished in 2008, after the film “La Vie en Rose” created a whole new generation of passionate Piaf fans, Monique Lange’s biography of Piaf comes closer to capturing her personality and explaining her behavior than any other biography that I have read. An editor, writer, actress, and scriptwriter, Lange associated with some of the same Parisians who adored Piaf, especially Jean Cocteau, who persuaded Piaf to act in one of his plays. Though she does not indicate that she ever met Piaf, Lange seems to understand her and appreciate how she became who she was. Often sympathetic to Piaf’s problems, Lange never forgets that Piaf was just as often impossible to deal with–her own worst enemy. Writing in the conversational style of a feature article for a magazine or newspaper, Lange “gets inside” her characters, draws conclusions about Piaf’s life, and provides many pages of candid photographs.
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In deciding to explore the complex and agonizing story of her brother’s life, Cuban author Cristina Garcia abandons her usual prose and writes in poetry, a form more appropriate for the intense feelings she bears toward her brother, a sick and broken man who was routinely victimized by his family as a child. Tracing her brother’s life from his birth in 1960, when the family became one of the first families to escape to New York from Castro’s Cuba, she recreates his life through poetry, up to 2007, when the book was first published. These short poems in free verse engage the reader in filling in some blanks, and as one does, the growing horrors of this child’s life; the author’s own feelings of guilt for being unable (for whatever reason) to stop the torments her brother endured; her intense resentments against her parents, especially her mother; and her abiding sadness for the shell of a man her brother has become threaten to overwhelm the reader in the same degree that they must have overwhelmed the author.
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The subtitle, “A Passionate Life,” epitomizes everything Edith Piaf believed in and stood for. Perhaps because of her impoverished childhood, in which even a small kindness meant everything, Piaf grew up craving attention and love. Abandoned by her mother, she grew up in Pigalle, doing whatever she could to stay alive and find happiness, however fleeting. If that meant doing a quick trick to get enough money to eat, she did that. If she could get enough money singing on a corner, she did that instead. Uneducated and unloved, she developed few, if any, inner resources, intellectually or emotionally, to deal with the fame that was to become her fate, and with her need for love, she was fair game for every manipulator, sleazy operator, and parasite who came her way. Marcel Cerdan, the love of Piaf’s life, as we see in the film, LA VIE EN ROSE, is just a small part of the story here. This book contains a full discography with detailed information about her song-writers.
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In the first biography of his new Great Stars series, which also includes Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, and Bette Davis, author David Thomson examines the career of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman (1915 – 1982), from her makeup-free screen test for David O. Selznick (1939) through Autumn Sonata (1978) made with Ingmar Bergman. Using the plots of her films as a framework for placing Bergman’s life and career into perspective, Thomson shows how each film drew on her life experience and increasing maturity to provide added depth to her characterizations. Thomson, a film critic, film historian, and author of Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films, is uniquely suited for this role, and as he presents each film and critiques Ingrid Bergman’s performances, the reader sees her growing on both the personal and professional levels. Remarkably, her reputation rests almost exclusively on the ten films she made between 1942 and 1949.
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David Small’s autobiographical novel, told through drawings, is a powerful tribute to the resilience of one boy’s spirit despite every possible attempt by his family to destroy it—and him. I had never read a “graphic novel” before and had no particular expectations when I began it, and I was unprepared for the directness with which this novel engages on an emotional level while still exhibiting many of the qualities one expects in the best written fiction. David Small illustrates his dysfunctional childhood–literally showing, rather than telling about, the harsh life to which he was exposed by his rigid and withdrawn mother and his cold, mostly-absent physician father. Throughout childhood, David sees himself as the star of an Alice-in-Wonderland existence, wrapping a yellow towel around his head, at age six, to resemble Alice as he plays, and, like Alice, accepting even the weirdest experiences—and the most bizarre family members–as part of his everyday existence. As the reader sees his disturbed mother and grandmother develop, and reads about his even more obviously disturbed great-grandparents, the visual unwinding of David’s life evokes strong, emotional responses, tantamount to that of a black-and-white film.
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Colson Whitehead’s newest “novel” is not strictly a novel at all. A book that he himself refers to as his “Autobiographical Fourth Novel,” it features a family that resembles his own—middle-class, upwardly mobile, and well-educated—a New York City-based family that spends summers at their vacation home in Sag Harbor, on Long island, “in the heart of the Hamptons.” Sag Harbor in 1985, the time frame of the action, has a large African-American summer community which owns compact homes on the beach, and a white summer community which lives uphill, with larger homes and panoramic views. For Benji, the fifteen-year-old main character, “There was summer, and then there was the rest of the year…It didn’t matter what went on during the rest of the year. Sag Harbor was outside the rules.”
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