Colin Fleming

I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud (review)

boyhood shames,/The tribulations one somehow survives,/Rise smokily from propitiatory flames//Of our forgetfulness . . . .” Many of the poets distance themselves from suffering and death by treating them ironically. In “In the Sixth Year of My Father’s Illness,” Andrea Hollander Budy offers this mordant observation: “Some truths/we cannot learn. Some we forget,//as my father did, who yesterday/introduced himself to me.” Despite this darkness and doubt, many find solace and pleasure in the present moment. Dana Gioia in “The Lost Garden” suggests that when we purge ourselves of our yearning for the past and of our hopes for the future, memory, too, can be a consolation: “The trick is making memory a blessing,/ To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,/Of wanting nothing more than what has been . . . .” Sometimes as we grow older we feel more isolated and become increasingly desperate to believe. In Dorianne Laux’s “After Twelve Days of Rain,” a middleaged woman tells us, “I’ve arrived/at a time in my life when I could believe/ almost anything.” At times life is seen as an uphill struggle; the only way to survive is to endure. In “Up But Not Over,” Marge Piercy writes, “Always past these/mountains are higher peaks//and rougher terrain as the light/begins to dim and the load gets/heavier. Shuffle and sigh./The only way to go is on.” In the end, death can be a blessing because it allows us to transcend worries and responsibilities. And Harvey Shapiro’s moving short poem “Desk” reads: “After my death, my desk,/which is now so cluttered,/will be bare wood, simple and shining,/as I wanted it to be in my life,/as I wanted my life to be.” The poems in Lasting run the gamut of forms and styles, and together they attest to the vibrancy of contemporary poetry. Meg Files has assembled a collection which touches on universal themes an which should speak urgently to all of us. (RS)

The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi (review)

you just have to cope as best you can. Instead of elevating Christopher to an innocent savant whose simplicity shames the rest of us, Haddon shows us the horror of autism and the havoc it wreaks on parents. If there is any remaining inclination on the reader’s part to romanticize the autistic mind, there is the nightmare of Christopher’s favorite dream: “Nearly everyone on earth is dead, because they have caught a virus. . . . And eventually there is no one left in the world except people who don’t look at other people’s faces. . . . And I can go anywhere in the world and I know that no one is going to talk to me or touch me or ask me a question.” What to do with such a child? The answer is the same as for any child: love him. Perhaps Haddon’s greatest triumph is that we really believe it when Christopher’s parents say, “I love you.” More importantly, we really believe it when Christopher says, “I love you” back. But expressions of love, like most information, are just approximate. Only with an autistic child, they’re more so. (PS)

Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy (review)

visited with the actor backstage after one of his skid-row performances and even invited Lugosi and his then wife back to his home, where the young admirer proudly showed off his collection of Lugosi memorabilia. This book is as much film-by-film synopsis and study as it is a biography, and the chapters can get a bit thick. But after reading it you may well find yourself converted, if you are not already, admiring the epic quality of the man and his doggedness to soldier on. Lugosi endured a life that would quash the spirit of most people: two-plus decades of money problems; a humiliating and debilitating reliance on drugs; the necessity of accepting just about any job, no matter how demeaning, to get by, while a former rival like Boris Karloff, who took the role in Frankenstein that Lugosi passed up, enjoyed phenomenal success despite a talent that the author sees as considerably lesser. Had he not been so disastrously typed, Lennig argues convincingly, Lugosi had the genius to play comedic roles that he was never considered for. Lugosi was a deeply flawed man, and Lennig deals with those flaws fairly. The years on the road, the constant touring, the endless scrambling for income, tore apart the Hungarian’s home life. Son Bela George barely had a relationship with his father (yet after Lugosi’s death, according to Lennig, he did absolutely everything possible to cash in on his father’s image). The Immortal Count is a classically tragic Hollywood tale and a worthwhile revision of Lennig’s important thirty-year-old biography. (CF) Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy; The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy by Simon Louvish St. Martin’s Press, 2004, 544 pp.,

Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World (review)

15.95 (paper)

John Clare: A Biography (review)

The book has sparked wildly disparate reactions. In the wake of its being awarded the 2001 Man Booker Prize, similarities to the Brazilian Moacyr Scliar’s 1981 Max and the Cats seemed to jeopardize Martel’s reputation. But he acknowledges his debt in the author’s note, with thanks to Scliar for that “spark of life” (a line that’s now a blurb on the 2003 Plume/Penguin edition of Scliar’s slim novel). And the visions, as well as the sentences, are the writer’s own. In both novels, the hero shares a lifeboat with a beast (Max with a jaguar, Pi with a Bengal tiger). Max sails from Germany to Brazil, Pi from India to Canada; both of them pray (but Max forgets to sometimes). Scliar’s book has Nazis in it, Martel’s Japanese and Mexicans. But finally, making such comparisons is absurd, a much different activity than actual reading. Certainly Martel takes pains with verisimilitude that Scliar doesn’t: Max in a desperate moment “pick[s] up a fishing line (luckily, there was already bait on the hook).” But if Life of Pi has a fault, it’s that all Martel’s work to suspend disbelief—Pi even debates the issue—risks belaboring the point. Better that than trivializing it, though. A film version to be produced and directed by the popular M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) might suggest that Martel’s novel has a similarly shallow appeal. But, appropriately enough today, when religion drives current events from internal culture wars to international conflicts, there’s nothing superficial about Life of Pi. Yann Martel brings the religious impulse to life without either diminishing it or proselytizing too much. His book will reward close reading and thoughtful consideration not only of its own probing of some of the central questions of human experience but of a theme it addresses with equal care, respect, urgency and humor: the act of storytelling itself. (SS)