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18 de maio de 2001 23:35
São Paulo, domingo, 20 de maio de 2001
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Books Update: The Original Ugly Duckling
Books Update from NYTimes.com
Friday, May 18, 2001
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A Biography of Hans Christian Andersen
1. In Sunday's Book Review: A Biography of "Hans Christian Andersen"
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Anne Tyler's "Back When We Were Grownups"
3. Special Section: Children's Books
4. New in Stores: Greg Lawrence's "Dance With Demons"
5. In the News: Author of "Hitchhiker's Guide," Dies at 49
6. New on the Best-Seller List: Mick Foley's "Foley Is Good"
7. In the Forums: Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"

1. In Sunday's Book Review: Jackie Wullschlager's "Hans Christian Andersen"
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May 20, 2001
The Uses of Enchantment
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Though he was homely and uneducated, Hans Christian Andersen maintained a steadfast belief in his own destiny.
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HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
The Life of a Storyteller.
By Jackie Wullschlager.
Illustrated. 489 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
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In "The Little Mermaid," Hans Christian Andersen suggests that "immortality can serve as a substitute, however unsatisfactory, for human love," writes Brooke Allen in a review of a new biography of the writer. "The story is clearly an allegory for his own life, for the unloved Andersen, more than 125 years after his death, can lay as good a claim as anyone to artistic immortality." Wullschlager, Allen says, perceptively notes that Andersen began to see the fairy tale "as a medium whose formal distance from reality would allow him to write as he was and felt -- not only as the social outsider but as the forbidden lover."
Andersen, Allen writes, had a number of crushes on both men and women (including the other Scandinavian superstar of his day, Jenny Lind) and at least one happy love affair with a man, "but he went through life essentially alone. As with so many artists, there was a bizarre contrast between Andersen's stunted personality and his work, which became ever more sophisticated and allusive. His later fiction, directed now toward an adult audience, anticipated Surrealism and Freudian ideas of the unconscious; it was experimental, self-referential, proto-modernist. In his personal life he displayed no such maturity."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/20/reviews/010520.20allent.html?0518bk

2. Also Reviewed This Week: Anne Tyler's "Back When We Were Grownups"
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In Anne Tyler's new novel, heroine Rebecca Davitch has decided, at the age of 53, that she has "turned into the wrong person" and is somehow fraudulent. As reviewer John Leonard notes, things were different "before she dumped her childhood sweetheart and her scholarly ambitions to marry Joe Davitch, to mother his three daughters from a previous marriage, to have a fourth of her own. Once upon a time, she used to recite poetry, picket her college cafeteria on behalf of underpaid workers, march against the war in Vietnam, worship Joan Baez and have crushes on serious people like Lincoln and Gandhi." As Tyler writes, "Now she could barely bring herself to vote. All she read in the newspaper was Ann Landers and her horoscope." Moreover, "she was tired of acting nicer than her true self."
Leonard writes of Tyler's work that "her whole fictional project is a dream song of second-guessing in centrifugal time. So maybe there's something glorious to be said, after all, for companionship, common cause and sanctuary. And what there is to say, Anne Tyler has been saying for decades, with gravity and grace. Instead of primal hordes and parricides, a Buddhist reciprocity. Look at the unsung heroes under every roof, in every home, making blue music. We are, she says, surrounded."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/20/reviews/010520.20leonart.html?0518bk

Audio
Anne Tyler has never before done a public reading of her work. This audio feature was recorded exclusively for NYTimes.com from her home in Baltimore. Tyler reads a passage from "Back When We Were Grownups" in which Rebecca, the widowed materfamilias of an unhappy clan, meets an ex-boyfriend for an awkward reunion.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/20/reviews/010520.20leonart.html#audio
Featured Author: Anne Tyler
A retrospective of Tyler's career, including reviews of her 14 previous novels, articles and book reviews written by her, plus the only interview Tyler is believed to have ever given, to The New York Times Book Review in 1977.

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"The Cold Six Thousand"
By James Ellroy
Laura Miller, reviewing the new novel by James Ellroy, author of "L.A. Confidential" and other books, notes that it is a sequel to "American Tabloid." Both, she writes, "depict an American political underbelly teeming with conspiracy and crime as seen through the eyes of midlevel operatives."
"American Tabloid" covered the five years leading up to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in 1963; "The Cold Six Thousand" begins a few minutes after President Kennedy's assassination and follows its characters as they meddle in the civil rights movement, the Las Vegas gambling industry and the Vietnamese opium trade, and ends in 1968 with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In Miller's view, the new novel's "plot is byzantine and the prose is so hard-boiled you could chip a tooth on it. . . . The sentences are short. The book is very long . . . the book often seems less a novel than an epic telegram."
William T. Vollmann's review of "American Tabloid," February 26, 1995
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American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm
By Gail Buckley
Reviewing this books that fills "a significant gap in our history," Catherine Manegold, a professor of journalism at Emory, writes that "In countless works of military history, the black contribution to America's armed forces has been ignored, diminished or denied." Journalist Gail Buckley "has recounted a remarkable human drama, one of struggle, betrayal and ultimate redemption," according to Manegold, who notes that "American Patriots" is a "work both fed and marred by the writer's passion for her subject."
In recounting the missing history of blacks in the military, "Gail Buckley tries to correct that history. . . . She succeeds in the end, but her journey is long and hard and the reader feels the weight of all the 14 years she spent at it." Buckley "shows the deep hypocrisy of a nation that was willing to let black soldiers fight even as it consistently denied them equal rights and equal recognition," but a flaw of the book is that the author is "so intent" on proving "that blacks have long been patriots that she routinely fails to see our history from any context but a soldier's."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/20/reviews/010520.20manegot.html?0518bk

3. Special Section: Children's Books
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The summer 2001 Children's Books special section includes reviews of more than 20 new books for young readers, including the latest posthumous books by Margaret Wise Brown, new tellings of the story of the Three Little Pigs and books for young readers based on ancient Greek myths.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/20/home/children-contents.html?0518bk
The section also includes a slide show with a selection of illustrations from the books being reviewed, a discussion by children's book experts of the role of summer reading in children's lives, the latest children's book best-seller lists and an archive of children's book reviews from the last four years.
Slide Show
Summer Reading Discussion
Children's Book Best-Seller List
Children's Book Review Archive

4. New in Stores: Greg Lawrence's "Dance With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins"
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Reviewing this biography of the choreographer Jerome Robbins, Janet Maslin said that the book "suffers from a glut of material, since its salient observations tend to be buried within long passages of chat. Though not structured as an oral history, it has the effect of one, with many, many people who knew Robbins invited to talk about him, and no particularly discerning ear to filter what they say."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/07/arts/07MASL.html?0518bk

5. In the News: Author of 'Hitchhiker's Guide,' Dies at 49
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Douglas Adams, whose cult science fiction comedy "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" drew millions of fans and spawned a mini-industry, has died at age 49.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/daily/adams-obit.html?0518bk
For a digest of this week's book news, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0518bk

6. New on the Best-Seller List
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Hardcover Nonfiction
#1) "Foley Is Good," by Mick Foley
The second behind-the-scenes memoir by the professional wrestler known as Mankind.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/bsp/index.html?0518bk
A note on our best-seller policy: The Times on the Web publishes the New York Times best-seller lists a week in advance of the printed Sunday Book Review. The lists published this week on the Web will appear in the print edition dated May 27 and are based on sales through last weekend.

7. In the Forums: Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"
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In the European Literature forum, readers are finding allegorical meanings in Thomas Mann's 1929 novel, "The Magic Mountain." One reader says, "By placing the action in a sanatorium Mann is trying to show how sick that society was. "Readers are also finding that Mann's characters are meant to exemplify certain worldviews. One reader suggests that Settembrini is "a true representative of the humanist at the turn of the century"; another reader says that prudish Hans Castorp represents Victorian morality.
Participants in the Reading Group have selected "Soul Mountain," by the Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian, for the June book.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0518bk

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