Sir Frank Kermode has been writing peerless literary criticism for more than half a century. Pieces of My Mind includes his own choice of his major essays since 1958, beginning with his extraordinary study "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev" and ending with a marvelous consideration of Shakespeare's Othello and the Verdi-Boito Otello. Important essays on Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, problems in literary theory and analysis, Wuthering Heights, Auden, and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence," as well as four previously unpublished essays (including one on "Memory" and one on "Forgetting"), fill out this rich and rewarding volume. Pieces of My Mind also contains recent considerations of the work of major modern writers -- Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Ian McEwan, Tom Paulin, and others. Richard Howard wrote that Kermode's last book, Shakespeare's Language, was "a triumph of inauguration and the crowning action of his splendid career of criticism. It is, and will doubtless remain, the first book one should read about Shakespeare's plays, and with those plays, in order to understand them and whatever has been written concerning them since." Pieces of My Mind has equal authority and power, and it merits equal praise.
|
