In his masterful portrayal of Michelangelo’s four-year effort to fill the 12,000 square foot, vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with new frescoes for Pope Julius II, a commission Michelangelo had tried to avoid, Ross King examines and places in context the known details of Michelangelo’s life, the images he includes in the frescoes, and his relationship with Pope Julius II, called the “terrifying Pope,” a man who is thought, ironically, to have been much like Michelangelo himself in personality. This was a tumultuous and monumental era artistically, one in which Pope Julius II tore down the existing St. Peter’s Basilica and started a completely new cathedral, created new papal apartments and a library, planned an immense tomb for himself, and determined to have the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel frescoed in a way which would confer even greater status upon himself and the church. This vibrant and exciting atmosphere offered Michelangelo and his contemporaries many opportunities for work, but competition was fierce, artists were always at the mercy of their patrons, and they didn’t have much, if any, choice in their subject matter, a fact that author King stresses in the book’s title. Set in 1508 – 1512, this book is an exciting depiction of life for artists more than five hundred years ago.
Read Full Post »
In his brief biographies of approximately forty “literary rogues,” from the Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814) to James Frey (1969 – ), author Andrew Shaffer enumerates the many addictions of each author – virtually all of them associated with alcoholism and drugs and/or their frequent carryover into sexual obsession. In fact, if one were to regard these authors as typical of the period, one might conclude that, until the last couple of decades, addictions of all kinds were practically mandatory for successful writers. How else, these authors seemed to think, could a writer tap into his creativity and release his “inner story-teller” with all its attendant angels or demons? Joyce Carol Oates once pointed out that “nobody tells anecdotes about the quiet people who just do their work,” and the author himself observes that if you “Take a look at any list of the top hundred novels of all time…you’ll see plenty of quiet, sober names…As memoirists have known for years, the more [messed] up your life, the more compelling your life story.” Here some of the “wayward authors” get more of the attention they obviously sought, but the fact that they are here, and known to the reader at all, attests to the fact that they somehow managed to achieve fame, if not respect, despite their various addictions and problems.
Read Full Post »
Illustrating this collection of anecdotes about twenty world-famous authors with startling photographs, Javier Marías, one of Spain’s most respected contemporary authors, shares personal oddities about each of them. Here he presents individual mini-bios as if they were short stories, “enhancing” some details (though all details are said to be true) and minimizing others, bringing literature’s icons to life, showing them with all their warts and blemishes. Some of these tales have the feel of secret histories, those stories that the authors’ publicists (if, indeed, such animals had existed at the time) would try to suppress. Yet Marías writes with humor, not with bile—and in most cases with actual affection, the three exceptions being James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Yukio Mishima.
Read Full Post »
With unusual insight and great enthusiasm, Ross King has several times written books about monumental works of art, placing them in historical context, characterizing the artist, and emphasizing what makes these artistic achievements unique. Each of these books about an artwork – the dome of a cathedral, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the Last Supper mural – has received international recognition for its literary style, the accuracy of the research, and the excitement King generates as he details the trials and troubles the artist faced while creating his work for a sometimes less-than-adoring public. Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture was Non-Fiction Book of the Year for Book Sense in 2000. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling was nominated for both the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award (Canada), and this year Leonardo and the Last Supper was winner of the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction – all well deserved prizes. King’s fast-paced narrative style, his vibrant descriptions (aided by well chosen illustrations), and intuitive understanding of what makes art come alive for readers make him unique among contemporary authors, a man whose writing about an artwork pays true homage to the art itself. This is an exciting and utterly absorbing study of an artist, his work, his frustrations, and his glory.
Read Full Post »
Palace intrigue of the highest order, conducted by courtiers and officials who will do anything to achieve their goals, makes this novel by Swedish author Per Olov Enquist both stimulating and thoroughly engrossing, and few who read it will fail to notice the similarities of the “normal” behavior one sees between these courtiers in their time and place and those “aides” or sycophants who surround other leaders of other countries in other times. The Danish court from 1768 – 1772 pulses with life as powerful personalities collide in their rush to fill the power vacuum resulting from the weakness of King Christian VII, a sensitive, half-mad 17-year-old boy, who married the innocent and unsuspecting Princess Caroline Mathilde, the 15-year-old sister of Britain’s King George III, just two years before the novel opens. When the young king becomes interested in the enlightened ideas of Voltaire and Diderot and is celebrated by these philosophers on a trip around the continent, his nervous and threatened court decides he needs a physician to disabuse him of these “follies.” What they never expect is that the physician they engage, Johann Friedrich Struensee from Germany, will quickly establish a strong and genuinely caring relationship with Christian, share his enlightened ideas, and eventually become the de facto king and lover of the young queen Caroline Mathilde.
Read Full Post »
