In simple language that sometimes takes on the cadences of the psalms, the soaring intensity of opera, and the beautifully repeated phrases of canons, author Veza Canetti tells the semi-autobiographical story of an artistic couple trapped just outside Vienna at the time of Kristallnacht, November, 1938, a terror she and her husband had also endured. The Canettis managed to escape from Austria just ten days after Kristallnacht, and immediately upon their arrival in England, Veza Canetti began to write this book. Using fictional characters, she fills the narrative with vibrant details from her own recent experiences, completing the “novel” in the spring of 1939. Though this novel was scheduled for publication in 1939, Britain’s entry into the war prevented this, and it remained among Canetti’s papers after her death in 1963. Prepared for publication and released for the first time in 2001, sixty-two years after it was written, it has finally been released in paperback. (On my Favorites List for 2007)
Read Full Post »
With Ironweed, William Kennedy completes his three novels of Depression-era Albany, wrapping up this study of time, place, and people with an emotionally gripping Pulitzer Prize-winner (1984) that focuses on those who call themselves “bums,” all of them living apart from society because their dreams have died. Here Francis Phelan, long-absent father of Billy Phelan, returns to Albany for the first time in twenty-two years. A former pro ballplayer, Francis lost his career when he lost part of a finger in a fight. He abandoned his wife Annie and his family when he accidentally dropped and killed his 13-day-old son Gerald, an act for which he still atones. A book so good it will leave you reeling, Ironweed tears at the heart without showing a trace of sentimentality, depicting hard lives lived by down-and-out people, most of whom still possess the redeeming virtues of the more saintly who live “normal” lives. Hard-edged, sometimes violent, and even cruel, it also reveals human kindness, sweetness, and love. (On my list of All-Time Favorites.)
Read Full Post »
Chasing after her rowdy dog-pack one day, the Queen discovers them barking at a “removal-like van,” a bookmobile, parked outside the kitchen at Windsor. Entering the mobile library to apologize for the din, the Queen meets Norman Seakins, a young man from the kitchen whose primary interest is in gay books and photography. Feeling obligated to take a book, the Queen borrows a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, intending to return it the following week. Almost immediately, her life changes. That night, when the President of France arrives, she abandons her usual safe conversation and, addressing the president, remarks, “I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet…Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless, as bad as he was painted?” In this wickedly wry novella, Alan Bennett explores reading, writing, and their effects on our lives as he develops this imaginative and warmly humorous scenario. (A Favorite for 2007)
Read Full Post »
Focusing on the life of Henry James, Colm Toibin’s The Master goes way beyond the usual “novelization” of someone’s biography. Toibin has done a tremendous amount of research and has obviously read everything James has written, but he has so completely distilled all of this information, that in writing this book, he actually recreates Henry James. James, an American by birth, is a lonely and solitary figure throughout the novel, a man unable to form a committed relationship with anyone, either male or female, sometimes wanting companionship but not closeness, and always needing solitude to work. Through flashbacks, Toibin shows how James’s early upbringing may have been partly responsible for his feelings of isolation. Toibin’s dual focus on James’s life and how it is embodied in his fiction, give a powerful immediacy and sense of verisimilitude to this novel, so strong that one cannot help but feel an emotional connection to James, no matter how remote he may seem otherwise. (On my Favorites List for 2004)
Read Full Post »
Vivid and hard-edged, Dancer fuses fact and fiction seamlessly, successfully recreating the essence of a larger-than-life star like Rudolf Nureyev and illuminating the many secret worlds he inhabited. At the same time, Dancer also manages to capture the heart, making an unlikable egomaniac into an understandable human and his rise to stardom a goal the reader both shares and celebrates. His legs were the source of “more violence than grace,” and there was “more intuition in him than intellect, more spirit than knowledge.” In his first brief recital, he was filled with “kinetic fury,” and even when he reached the height of his powers, when much of the world regarded his dance partnership with famed ballerina Margot Fonteyn as both intimate and elegant, his style was also described by others as “ferocious.” Nureyev’s “wild and feral” style of dance meshes perfectly with McCann’s prose. Filled with intriguing characters, ranging from simple Russian peasants to Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, John Lennon, Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and the stars of ballet, the novel is a monument to the power of the creative spirit and a testament to the dangers inherent in a life from which all other controls have been removed. (My favorite novel of 2003)
Read Full Post »
