Hilary SpurlingKirja-arvosteluja

Such fun! And what a cute edition, with its play on the classic paperback caricature illustrations and a pile of the rainbow-covered 12 editions of the Dance.

Now that I'm 7/12ths of the way through Powell's masterwork, I have started dipping into Spurling's dance - cautiously, I might add, since it is by design full of spoilers! Powell himself asking Spurling, then a young biographer, to write this, and she has since commented that it felt like taking an engine apart and ending up covered in grease.

This is truly an indispensable guide. Powell's 12 books are not so much a series as one novel split into two parts. Spurling exhaustively chronicles characters (real and fictional, appearing and mentioned) along with artists and places that recur through the work. The biographies are concise but effective, and include page references for all appearances of each character (with the exception of Jenkins, of course!) Concluding with a short but effective synopsis of each of the 12 novels alongside a chronology.

45 years after its publication, Spurling's Invitation is still regularly consulted by fans of Powell. And, boy, have I come to understand why. With each passing volume, the complexity of character and circumstance deepens. Who is anyone - Jean Templer, Kenneth Widmerpool, Molly Andriadis - really? We see characters from Nick's point of view, we hear about them from many others, and we reflect on conversations and engagements we experienced years ago. The Dance will reward endless rereading, and I'm comforted that Spurling will be there to accompany me.

A genuinely useful companion to the Dance.

I think that Matisse’s paintings are wonderful because he enjoyed doing them and he put ideas and feelings into them. But I wonder about our experiences when we go an art gallery. Art goers come from different spheres of life. If I look at something and don't understand the deeper ideas within I can choose to shut up or I can comment at the level I can reach - nothing wrong with that. When I saw an exhibition of Matisse Cirque pictures I was bemused because I could see many of the forms but I could not understand Matisse's choice of subjects for each picture. I was a little disappointed that there was nothing there that appealed to me like his blue nudes. But as I listened and read about the pictures that I was looking at I discovered some interesting ideas and I felt that there was a journey through the sequenced pictures. Months later I saw an exhibition of Fauvist paintings which were hung in black walled rooms with strong lighting illuminating the work. The effect was stunning. There are no works from Matisse (that I can think of) that are The Great Masterpiece that everyone knows and can name (people can reply to this review as they wish) but in the history of art Matisse contributed to and experienced the creation of a number of interesting genres.

Before he became an artist Matisse spent a little more than a year in Paris. In those months the Eiffel Tower was built up from nothing to the great structure it is today. He then went sick and ended up in bed from some months with not much to do except learn to paint. His final pieces were also created from wheel chair or bed.

I am sure that colour was of prime importance to Matisse when he was a Fauvist. I am not so sure that colour was so important to him when he was cutting out shapes, it seems to be more the desire to suggest objects using flat shapes, and even there he was not trying to develop 3D images but simply create objects flatly.

The artist should not be concerned about measures, whether time, or acceptance. Instead, when working on his/her art, the artist should, with all of his/her capacity and will, enter the realm where these measurements don't apply; where all there is is the uniqueness, creativity, and vision of each artist. Of course, this is very difficult; the ego feeds on measurements of power, influence, wealth, success and so on. Once ridden of these concerns, the artist is ready to produce and express uniqueness, which is the contribution that adds to art, that enriches both: art and the artist. And if afterwards, when the critics/experts, gallery owners and the like, decide that the art produced doesn't "measure up," then there is reason for the artist to savour a degree of satisfaction, in that he/she expressed what undoubtedly is his/hers alone. This doesn't mean that the work will necessarily go unnoticed. On the contrary; it might be recognized as its very own kind, just like the great works that have been created, certainly, by the same process.

The book? Too much biography and not much on Matisses's art itself.

Relentlessly positive portrayal. While Spurling is good for info on Buck's first marriage, don't rely on this biography alone if you want an idea of the actual, rounded person -- indeed, for the actual, rounded anything. Spurling needs to read up on Orientalism; some of this is just embarrassing (when it's not infuriating). Also, Buck's writing about poverty does not automatically make her work Dickensian. Spurling is a good researcher here (on Buck; clueless about China), provides useful background --with several other texts -- for teaching The Good Earth, but I'd never read this for fun and as a biographer she's kind of a hack.

sadly a boring book about a very interesting true story

It took me three attempts before I was able to finish this one. It's not Spurling's fault, she writes clearly and well, and her research is impressive, it's just that Matisse, as great an artist as he was, was not a particularly interesting person. Most of the book is him complaining about his nerves or about a variety of physical ailments (mostly related to his nerves), and the same goes for his family. You'd be much better off buying a nice catalog of his beautiful work.

Why do you need a biography of a writer that wrote a twelve-volume quasi-autobiographical novel, and four volumes of memoirs? Because his great gift was seeing other people, not himself. He told the The Paris Review: “I have absolutely no picture of myself. Never have had.”

Being Powell’s admirer, late-in-life friend, and officially-appointed biographer didn’t keep Hilary Spurling from a frank discussion of the fact that his wife, Lady Violet, appears to have had an affair during the war which knocked him into a deep depression. (They recovered and had a long, happy marriage.)

The story is heavily front-loaded—we’re already three quarters of the way through the book before Powell writes the first volume of the twelve volume cycle that makes him famous, A Dance to the Music of Time. And the 20 or so years following the publication of the last volume, in which he published several more books and presumably did other things, are relegated to a brief postscript.

Spurling also wrote, also at the invitation of Powell, the excellent reference book Invitation to the Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (1977). Endless browsing pleasure, if you liked those books.

Do you wonder whether you might like A Dance? Then here are a couple entries on minor characters from Spurling’s handbook picked nearly at random. If this amuses you, then it will amuse you.

JEAN-NEPOCUMENE

The younger and quieter of Mme Leroy’s two young relatives, perhaps great-nephews, at La Grenadière in 1923. Possible author of the crude but not unaccomplished drawing of Widmerpool etched on the wall of the cabinet de toilette.
QU 114-5, 122-3, 137-8, 142, 156, 159, 161, 164.

MAISKY

Lady Molly’s monkey, bought in Soho in 1934 and named for the then Soviet ambassador. Receives homage at the Jeavons’ party (‘There was something of Quiggin in his seriousness and self-absorption: also in the watchful manner in which he glanced from time to time at the nuts, sometimes choosing one specially tempting to crack’); and brings out Miss Weedon’s anti-simianism.
Later bites Erridge’s butler Smith who d. after trying to filch a biscuit from him: “Silly thing to do, to take issue with Maisky. Of course Smith came off second-best. Perhaps they both reached out for the biscuit at the same moment. Anyway, Maisky wouldn’t have any snatching and Smith contracted septicemia with fatal results. Meant the end of Maisky too, which wasn’t really just. But then what is really just in this life?” (Ted Jeavons). Far outclassed Sillery in point of devastating monkey-like shrewdness.
LM 160-1, 163-4, 167-8. KO 235. MP 78-9. BDFR 7.

Great read! Pearl is a remarkable woman. Only biography I've ever actually wanted to read.

Mine is a bit of an unfair review; this was presented in 5, 13-minute segments, and I caught only the last two. But those two covered the writing of Dancing to the Music of Time, which is what Powell is known for. I'm afraid I was distracted by the reader's presentation, which I found somewhat inappropriate. She read like it was a thriller, every word weighted with drama, when the fact of the matter was that it was rather mundane. If you are particularly interested in Powell, you would likely enjoy this biography. Otherwise, it didn't appear that there was anything unusual or exciting about his life that would keep the average person interested, and I'm certain that wasn't the result of the abridging. The reader, Hattie Morahan, furthermore had a tendency to use odd inflections. I realize the British inflect differently from Americans, but typically that's within a word itself. But when the inflection occurs within a phrase, such as "spring WATER" rather than "SPRING water", it affects the attention given. Suddenly one is focusing on the water itself, rather than the fact that it was a spring being highlighted. Momentarily distracted, I would find myself lost in the narrative and have to backtrack and replay the last few minutes. It was very good for inducing sleep, however.

Anthony Powell’s twelve novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is one of the great jewels of post war British literature. Largely biographical, and narrated in the first person, it offers a glorious perspective of life stretching from before the First World War until the late 1960s, featuring a cast of hundreds of characters. Often very funny, a bedrock of melancholia also runs through the story. One of the most striking aspects, however, is how little we learn about the narrator himself.

Hilary Spurling, well known for her various literary biographies, was a friend of the Powell family for many years, and had previously published Invitation to the Dance, a handbook to the Music of Time sequence which lists all the characters, analyses their intricate relationships and summarises all the plots and subplots – in itself a Herculean feat.

Her latest book takes the form of a biography that focuses on Powell’s early years and the period during which he wrote the Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Extensively researched, Spurling’s book certainly illuminates the sequence, casting light on many aspects of the characters and the often bizarre mishaps that befall them. Appropriately her style of writing resembles Powell’s own approach to narrative. In his hands, it works majestically, drawing the reader in to his chronicles. Many writers have tried to emulate it, and have simply succumbed into rambling.

It is far from being a whitewash or hagiography, however, and in fact, in many ways Powell comes across as an often unsavoury character, and certainly less amiable than Nick Jenkins, his counterpart from the sequence.

Review: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling.

The author has done a wonderful job of representing and translating Pearl Buck’s life in China and America. After reading this book you will understand how Pearl’s life and events were embedded in all her writings. Spurling doesn’t hold anything back which keeps the book enjoyable and interesting. She has written the time Buck spent in China with its confusing and dense culture and collated a collection of facts with conclusive accuracy and describes them in sections of vast time frames and personalities. The book was also educational underlining the history of US-Chinese relations in the early twentieth century.

As I read it was like placing the pieces of Pearl Buck’s life together as a puzzle connecting all the gaps without any confusion. The book is both compelling and an emotional rollercoaster of a women’s life that will have you wondering how this woman struggled and survived.

The author also relates a lot of insight to the times Pearl Buck spent in America with the same kindness and accuracy she so describes in magnitude. The book is well written, interesting and delivers the justification that Pearl Buck deserves as a person and writer. I think it is a must read if you’re an avid reader of Pearl Bucks writings.

Another audiobook serendipity, riveting and eye-opening. Loses some of its vivid intensity after Buck gets married and the author no longer has the source material of Buck's biographies of her parents, with the emotional truth of Buck's marriage somewhat unclear (perhaps obscured by lack of reliable source material) and her later life just sad and vague. But this book is subtitled "Journey to the Good Earth" not "A Life" and it fully tells the story of that journey. Now that I understand how thoroughly Buck knew the peasant life of which she wrote, I am looking forward to reading The Good Earth, knowing that it will be as authentic as possible, considering the challenges of a literate outsider writing from the point of view of illiterate peasants. Hilary Spurling establishes how Pearl's life experiences gave her both the empathy and the knowledge to write authentically about a culture not her own. I was also very touched by the story of Pearl's devotion to her disabled daughter Carol, but a little disturbed by her need to keep adopting new babies later in life, since it seems she did it just to be surrounded by children, not to actually parent them.
(The author reads the audiobook and does a great job.)

A fascinating biography of a man who was not only a great artist, but also a man who gave of himself selflessly. This book isn't stuffy; it paints an interesting and very readable portrait. Matisse is human, but constantly pushed himself to develop as an artist. It's giving me a new appreciation for his work. He suffered due to the fact that he was constantly conpared to Picasso and deemed to be a minor player. At the end, a visitor was moved to see "'a great artist still so absorbed in trying to create when death was at his doorstep...when there was no longer time.'"

(I am referring to Sonia Orwell as Brownell (her maiden name) – or just Sonia - in my review, to distinguish her from George Orwell).

Being a massive George Orwell fan, I picked this up on a whim when I spotted it for £1. I didn’t really know much about Sonia Brownell, although I had read that she was a gold-digger who married Orwell for his money. Hilary Spurling, a friend of Sonia’s, determined to set the record straight in this biography of Sonia’s life.

The earlier parts of the biography are interesting, detailing Sonia’s early life in India and the UK, and her entry into literary and artistic circles in London and Paris. Originally though of as a ‘hanger-on’, she showed her true abilities after getting a job editing Cyril Connolly's literary magazine ‘Horizon’ in the 1940s. After a number of failed affairs, she married Orwell, who immortalised Sonia as Julia in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and, after his death, she was fiercely protective of his works and estate – although she died penniless due to a number of bad decisions. It is Brownell who was responsible for Orwell’s essays and letters being published. Orwell stipulated in his will that no biography was to be written. Eventually Brownell did commission one, but only because an unauthorised version was due to be published and she wanted a more reliable version of Orwell’s life to balance things.

After Orwell’s death, Brownell had other relationships and eventually married Michael Pitt-Rivers but he was gay so naturally their marriage didn’t last. Brownell continued to be fiercely loyal to her friends until the end of her life but to my mind never achieved real happiness and died virtually penniless.

Obviously Spurling portrays Brownell in a favourable light. Some people will still think of her as an opportunist who married Orwell for her own gain, but Spurling’s side of things shows her as someone who enriched what little life Orwell had left, and it seems she really did love him. I’m not sure to whom this biography would appeal, but as an Orwell fan I found it very interesting, if a little dry in places.

As the title suggests, this is a biography of Pearl Buck, author of The Good Earth. I found it very enjoyable.

Pearl Buck was an American born and raised in China by missionaries. She grew up interacting with Chinese children - speaking the language and learning the stories. She was so comfortable in China that she never really identified with America when she visited there or when she ended up living there in the second half of her life. The book does an interesting job of weaving Chinese history into Buck's life and showing how it influenced and formed her. Also discussed at length is her relationships with her mother, father, and husbands and her complete rejection of the missionary philosophy as practiced in China by her father and others.

Her writing is discussed quite a bit as well, particularly because so many of the dozens of books and stories she wrote had considerable portions of autobiographical content or obvious ties to her friends, family, and experiences. I had no idea Pearl Buck had written so prodigiously, but I also have to say I'm not interested in reading much further than a reread of The Good Earth and possibly continuing on with the 2 books that complete the series. Buck's writing was written for the masses and it doesn't seem from this biography's description that most of them were the quality that you'd expect from the author of [The Good Earth]. I did find it interesting that she wrote by crafting the words in Chinese in her mind and translating to English as she typed the manuscript, at least for The Good Earth.

I thought this was a very readable and interesting biography of a fascinating woman.

A good, comprehensive biography with the only nagging doubts caused by the traces of Spurling's suppressed hero-worship. By the end of this, the first of two volumes, you get the feeling Picasso is being set up a little too neatly as the arch-nemesis of the next book; she seems to have difficulty in overcoming what Gertude Stein coined the Matisseite/Picassoite divide, or even accepting those who found themselves on the other side.

Really focuses on the events in her life that popped up in the themes and characters of her writing - The Good Earth Trilogy and to a lesser extent her other works. The tragedy, lonliness/bad marriage and the need to earn money to take care of her daughter with PKU was more than enough motivation and fodder. She really put herself into her books. And everyone read her. I had to read The Good Earth in school, but honestly don't remember much of it, except that I never understood why it was a classic or so widely read. Hilary Spurling's book gave me a much greater appreciation for the magnitude of what Buck achieved with the book - and works in general - in terms of introducing Westerners to rural poor China in early 20th century, really helping to bridge the very real East/West divide. Spurling writes that Buck's articulation was clearer and more on target even than contemporary Chinese scholars/literary circles which rarely came in contact with such folk. And Buck's public denounciation of the (Presbyterian) missionary mission in China and the rest of the world and its cultural/religious imperialism, did much to bring that to the world's attention. Her efforts to do the best for her daughter and others with disabilities, and her scandalous affair with her publisher, but more her frankness in writing about sexuality and marital strife/rape/violence also put her in a class of women breaking the mold and pushing the boundaries of contemporary societal acceptance. Buck was a fascinating woman and this is a fascinating account that renews Buck's relevancy to modern times. Based on reading Spurling's work, I am putting many of Buck's books on my to read list right now, including The Good Earth trilogy (The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided) but also Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China, Pavilion of Women, and Dragon Seed.

This is an extremely well written and researched book about Pearl Buck, a woman who blazed trails, was a many-layered individual and, I think, born before her time. Her writing did a great deal to raise consciousness about the plight of the millions of Chinese peasants both before and after WWII, among many other causes that she focused on. Hilary Spurling takes advantage of the mounds of letters written by and to Pearl Buck and the host of other materials which encompassed her life and weaves it into a rich, very readable book.

Obviously this is a biography of the author Pearl Buck. Emphasis was on the forces that shaped her as a writer.

I'd never read a biography of Pearl Buck previously. Of course I knew the basics ... that she had lived in China, and that China had formed her as much or more than the West. I assumed she'd grown up there, and further assumed it likely that she was the daughter of missionaries.

The details of her early experiences were fascinating to me.

I knew that she was an advocate for Human Rights, etc., but hadn't known that she was quite such a pioneer. Her anti-colonial views about mission work were ahead of their time as well.

This was an excellent biography and was so absorbing that I read it in just a couple of days.

Breathless. In Matisse: The Life, Hilary Spurling compresses her masterful two-volume biography into something more manageable for the general reader. I think she must have done it by simply removing all of the air and squeezing. Because the overwhelming feeling for the reader of Matisse: The Life is of a life – a very long life – lived at a fevered pitch. From his earliest days to his death eighty years later, Henri Matisse fought a battle with himself, his art, and his family. That Spurling is able to carry the reader along at breakneck pace across this landscape is testament to her ability as a biographer to present as much as possible for her reader and, otherwise, stay out of the way.

Perhaps every life of a great artist is filled with struggle. Here, each crisis is presented as a life crisis, whether it be the decision to break away from the grey palette of his northern youth, or to spend his last resources on an inspiring mounted brilliant blue butterfly, or to favour colour over conflict. This is the romantic, heroic life of self-inflicted penury, striving against norms, seeking within for some vision, which may only be appreciated fifty years hence. At the same time, Matisse clearly has a counterbalancing conformism, an almost bourgeois approach to the art business and to family. Spurling does not judge, though she clearly is in sympathy with her subject.

However interesting Matisse’s life might have been, what animates it for the reader is his art. Fortunately, Spurling is very good at describing works (the text includes a number of colour reproductions) and, most especially, at carrying the reader through the process of creation. Perhaps, like me, you will remain bemused by gestation periods of many years for certain paintings. But at least you will feel that there is probably something more there, just out of reach.

A long life worth living is filled with love and Matisse’s is no exception. Despite an early break with his father, the bonds of family remain rock solid. His relationship with his wife, Amélie, is completely integrated into his artwork. His children and later grandchildren are vital. He is at times irascible, petulant, domineering, childish, devoted, sanguine: in short, a man. One of the most delightful episodes, which here is passed over quickly without comment, occurs when Matisse, who had been looking after his new daughter-in-law’s dog while she and his son were on their honeymoon, refuses to give it back when they return. He had grown so attached to it that he could not bear to part with it the rest of its life. You cannot help but smile.

For readability, I might have preferred some spacing in this telling, a chapter here or there at a lesser pace in order to allow the reader to catch his or her breath. But perhaps that is asking too much. In any case, if you cannot spare the time for Spurling’s even longer two-volume work on Matisse, then I recommend you at least take up this compressed life. Just hold on to your hat.

Before reading this book, the only thing I’d really known about Pearl S. Buck was that she went to the same college as I went to. I’d also read The Good Earth many years ago, but didn’t care for it much (or maybe I didn’t understand it as well as I might otherwise have). Pearl Buck in China isn’t just a biography; it focuses mostly on how Pearl Buck’s childhood and adulthood in China influenced her writing and life.

It’s a very strong, well-organized book that sticks closely to what the author set out to do. The Good Earth is Pearl Buck’s best-known book, but this biography focuses on all of her fiction that deals with China. There are some sketchy places in the book when the author talks about the family dynamic between the Sydenstrickers, and again at the end when describing Pearl Buck’s later life. So many biographies focus on the facts that they forget about the person they’re dealing with; in this book, I really liked how the author managed to convey a sense of Pearl Buck’s personality while at the same time educating her reader on Pearl’s writing. I think Pearl Buck’s story gets overshadowed by the stories of the lives of authors who had more “interesting” lives, so it’s nice to see her getting some attention again. My one irritant about this book is that the author refers to the former Randolph-Macon Woman’s College as Randolph-Macon, when someone more familiar with the school would probably refer to it as R-MWC, for short, to avoid confusion with the college in Ashland, VA. But this is minor.

On a side note that has nothing to do with the author’s theme (but it’s interesting nonetheless): when you take a tour of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College), virtually one of the first things you’re told is that Pearl Buck went there. They are very proud of having her as an alumna, and rightly so. It’s funny to learn from this book that in reality, because Pearl felt like an outsider there, she didn’t enjoy her college experience, and therefore had selective memory about the whole thing. I found myself sympathizing with her when I read that! Authors often write about what they’re most comfortable with, and that was certainly true for Pearl Buck.½

I only knew three things about Pearl Buck:
* she wrote The Good Earth
* she was the only non-alcoholic American to win a Nobel Prize for Lit
* she was the only American woman to win a Nobel

But a review I heard on NPR piqued my interest. While trying to secure a library copy of this bio, I read one of her books but gave up on a second. (The second wasn't that bad, but I got sidetracked--as I frequently do.)
This bio was fascinating. Born to missionary parents and raised in the China of the turn of the 20th Century, her sensibilities were more attuned to the East than the West. While her novels and stories often didn't meet with critical acclaim, readers loved them.
In the end, though, hers is a sad story. Barred from returning to China after the Communists took over, she became an unhappy exile in America. The early years were tolerable, until her second husband died. She then withdrew from life, surrounding herself with a coterie who coddled her increasingly bizarre eccentricities.

a very nice bio about a very passionate painter

The horrific lives women endured, i.e. Pearl's mother, and Chinese society, anguish of lost children, not to mention the subservient female role, it's a miracle western women have evolved from those conditions.