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Anatole Broyard, Kafka was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (Crown Publishing, 1993) Over the course of his career as daily book reviewer for the New York Times and senior editor of its Sunday Book Review, Anatole Broyard gained a reputation for being nearly impossible to please. (One of his more famous acerbic, yet always articulate, reviews was of Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody.) His own high literary expectations might account for the fact that, upon his death in 1991, his entire creative output consisted of a few short stories and essay collections, and an unfinished memoir of life in post World War II New York (and especially Greenwich Village), published two years later as When Kafka was the Rage. Former student and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler writes, "Broyard recognized that American life was entering a period of profound social and sexual change. Carried by this change, he moved in with Sheri Donatti, a beautiful painter 'who was a more radical version of Anais Nin'; he opened a bookstore; he befriended an array of famous or soon-to-be-famous literary figures; and he began to write. The memoir is full of the spirit of that remarkable time. We share the vivid company of such people as W.H. Auden, Rudolf Arnheim, Anais Nin, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight Macdonald, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. We haunt the sweetly shabby streets of the Village and dance the rhumba and samba in Spanish Harlem (with Schwartz and Macdonald, no less)" (November 14, 1993, Section C, Page 5). Robert Olen Butler in the Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1993, Section C, Page 5. MORE: Powell’s |
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