Another Beauty
Category: Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Arts & Literature
Another Beauty Details
Amazon.com Review "What would the great, innocent artists of the past, Giotto or van Eyk, Proust or Apollinaire, have done if some spiteful demon had set them down in our flawed and tawdry world, warped by so-called Totalitarianism?... And what if they had been transported to a wealthy nation, free, but indifferent--what would they have said?" Coming of age in communist Poland in the 1960s and '70s, and living now in Paris and Houston, Adam Zagajewski writes of his experiences on both sides of this political and economic divide. More deeply, however, his prose memoir probes and explores the questions that art must always face: How do we stay spiritually alive in an oppressive culture? How do we keep burning? "Reality expanded in the hands of the past's great artists," he writes. "It became enticing and mysterious, plumed like the wings of a hawk." So too with Zagajewski, both in his poetry (see especially Mysticism for Beginners and Canvas) and in many of the entries here. At times a simple paragraph in length, at other times ranging across a few pages, each section is both self-contained and a part of the whole. While apparently random--Another Beauty has no chapters, and no clear chronology--the brief passages each function as one facet on the diamond of the whole. This poet refuses easy irony. "Our task is far too serious for us to mind the fickle temper of the times," he writes. "We, things, are reality's roots, we are the pillars of being. We've got no use for young literary critics with their irony." Irony can be cheap, whether in Poland in the 1960s or in America in the new millennium. Zagajewski doesn't waste his time, or ours, with it. Instead he tends to reality. He knows he can't answer the big questions, but he also knows that those are the ones that matter. --Doug Thorpe Read more From Publishers Weekly The life of Eastern European communist dissidents, workers and intellectuals may already seem like ancient history to a younger generation speeding into the 21st century. But there's still a lot to be learned by listening to the voices of those who grew to maturity in communist Europe. One of the most eloquent among those voices is Zagajewski (Canvas, etc.), a major contemporary Polish poet. He offers a memoir suffused with the atmosphere of Poland in the 1960s and '70s, when he was a student and fledgling writer in Krakow. More like a series of poetic fragments than a continuous prose narrative, the various sections of the memoir include melancholy and tender tributes to the city of Krakow ("It was a matter of pride," he writes "to belong to such a city"); memories of the pre-communist world the city harkened back to; his study of philosophy and psychology, stunted by ideological restrictions at a communist-run university; and his membership in the emerging opposition movement. These stories are mixed with philosophical ruminations on various pieces of classical music, life's "wholeness," the nature of poetry, and literary and cultural figures of the period. Given that few readers will be familiar with these figures, however, this edition would have benefited from footnotes and biographical information. Subtle and intellectual (perhaps a bit too much so at times), Zagajewski's memoir will find its largest audience among readers who are already familiar with his Polish setting. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Booklist Early in this set of memories, reflections, and aphorisms, Zagajewski writes of the necessity, for the poet and the philosopher, of pursuing a vision of wholeness. He also confesses that his pursuit hasn't succeeded. Indeed, his elegant scrapbook is much concerned with dualities--truth and falsehood, poetry and prose, freedom and tyranny, youth and age, cynicism and credence, and especially good and evil. Born as Poland was delivered from Nazism to Communism, Zagajewski became philosopher and poet in a society in which ideology always trumped reality and excellence of any kind was punished. In the book's most recollective sections (about his student years in the miraculously preserved medieval city of Krakow), Zagajewski never fails to conjure that oppressive atmosphere. But he also notes that goodness, human and natural, was ever present in that atmosphere and slowly wore down totalitarian evil. Full of pithy and compelling observations on art and society, of luminous descriptions of Krakow and Paris, where Zagajewski now lives, this is a book to be read once through and returned to often, wherever one happens to open it or in search of a particular passage or statement. If not a book for everyone, it will be taken very close to heart by those who decide it is definitely for them. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more From Kirkus Reviews A quirky, offbeat memoir-cum-journal from a leading Polish poet.Although he modestly disclaims any major role in the Polish opposition of the 1970s and after, Zagajewski (Two Cities, 1995) is an important literary figure who was vocally dissident in the era of the great resistance to Communism in Poland. Here, he reflects back on those days and earlier with a mixture of dry-eyed nostalgia and wry-tongued wit. The author has no problem whatsoever in poking fun at the pretensions of a group of achingly, embarrassingly sincere 20-somethings-never hesitating to include himself among his targets. But the spirit of this book is generous to a fault, particularly in its evocation of the battered and weary faculty members whom he encountered during his college days in Krakow. What makes this volume unusual is its formal structure. Zagajewski alternates between reminiscences of the 1960s and '70s in Krakow, prose poems about his current life in Paris (and Houston, although the Texas city is almost never evoked), and notebook and journal jottings on a wide range of topics, chiefly music and poetry. Holding this potpourri together are certain thematic threads: writers who opine in "defense of poetry" and what that entails; the variegated effects of music on troubled minds; the vagaries of memory; and the life of cities. As he admits early in the book, "I can only try to reclaim a few moments, a few places and events; a few people I liked and admired, and a few that I despised." The result is a series of elliptical, sometimes cryptic anecdotes, recollections, image flashes, and miniatures. An engaging, occasionally frustrating, but generally very satisfying notebook, filled with acutely observed moments both past and present. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Read more About the Author Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945. His previous books, all published by FSG, include Tremor (1985), Canvas (1992), and Mysticism for Beginners (1997), collections of poetry; and Two Cities (1995), a collection of essays. He lives in Paris and Houston. Read more
Reviews
On the whole, AB is a fine book. Not quite a memoir in the traditional sense (because it contains little narrative, strictly speaking), it consists mainly of loosely linked observations about life, poetry, and art, together with reminiscences of life the author lived as a student in Krakow in the 1950s and 60s. Many of the ideas seem loosely to cluster around the notion of a defense of poetry, by which Zagajewski seems to mean the relevance of poetry—i.e., insights rendered in sharp, intense language—to life.The work is not often profound in individual passages; it is hardly aphoristic. Its main appeal lies in an accumulation of interesting observations that together reflect Zagajewski’s humane, charitable, and very attractive view of the world. Also helpful, since the West seems to lose sight of this fact over time, are the occasional reminders of just how repulsive the Communist regimes were. This awareness, however, is not an obsession, which allows the book to be about life generally, not life in a totalitarian society. (Indeed, to an extent the books illustrates what Václav Havel means about his attempt to live life in Communist Czechoslovakia as if—as if the regime permitted the freedoms it claimed to with the result that life becomes a quiet but determined effort to develop free imaginations and a freely-developed education in a society that worked hard to limit both.In the end, this is an unpretentious book that reflects its writer’s warm and good-natured view of a world that contains certain deeply intractable problems.