Pieces of My Mind

The New York Times

Pieces of My Mind condenses a lifetime of reading and critical judgment into 26 essays, ranging from 3,000 to 7,000 words. The longish essay -- speculative, provisional, allusive -- has always been the form best suited to Kermode's temperament (though the innumerable book reviews he has contributed to journals and newspapers, including this one, have had a greater impact). A handful of the essays that appear here have never been published. Others have been culled from his early books, with less damage than one would think, since almost all were originally freestanding lectures. — James Shapiro

Publishers Weekly

Born on the Isle of Man and linked over the years with Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia Universities, Kermode belongs to the superleague of internationally famous old-school literary critics that also includes Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and Christopher Ricks; his best-known works in America include The Sense of an Ending, Shakespeare's Language and an autobiography, Not Entitled. This hefty and very worthwhile collection samples his interests from opera to modern dance, from the New Testament to the English novelist Ian McEwan. It includes chapters from Kermode's most famous books, freestanding academic pieces and lectures, essay-reviews from the London Review of Books, and four substantial unpublished essays, including a provocative exploration of literary and cognitive "forgetting." Kermode's recurring subjects include Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Joseph Conrad, modern fiction and narrative generally, and the nature of interpretation. If his most theoretical work seems very much of its time (the 1970s and '80s), the work on novels, poems and plays stands up quite well, exhibiting Kermode's blend of sophisticated reading and consistently accessible writing. "Shakespeare and Boito" (a new piece) compares the original Othello to the one in Verdi's opera; "The Man in the Macintosh" (1979) asks Joyceans, and New Testament readers, "why do we prefer enigmas to muddles?" Kermode can simply observe, or ask questions, rather than advancing extended arguments, a way of reading that proves as instructive as it is satisfying. (Sept.) Forecast: Academics will notice, but popular recognition will depend on major coverage; the attention Kermode received for Shakespeare's Language (1999) augurs well for this career-summarizing follow-up. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Distinguished scholar and critic Kermode here compiles 19 lectures and essays on a wide variety of literary topics, ranging from a study of typology in Nathaniel Hawthorne to the influence of Cambridge University on the development of 20th-century literary criticism. Shakespeare, Emily Bront , Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, W.H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens are among the major authors whose works are considered. Kermode's graceful prose is jargon-free and his ideas intellectually challenging. He is broadly concerned with the relationship between the imagination and the world, art and truth, the role of narrative in modernist texts, and the human need for interpretation in both literature and life. These underlying concerns lend a unity to the collection that makes the effect of the whole greater than the sum of its parts. A series of "shorter notices," reviews of works by Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and others, round out the volume. Recommended for serious literature collections.-William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A chronologically arranged series of literary essays by the eminent scholar and critic, "offered indifferently to defense and prosecution, of the way in which a now quite long professional life has been spent." Cambridge don Kermode (Shakespeare's Language, 2000, etc.) never met a Shakespearean soliloquy or a biblical passage that he hasn't cared to pull apart to see how it ticks. In this lively collection, he sticks to favorite themes worked hard over many years, taking in not only Shakespeare and the Bible, but also moderns such as Auden and Wallace Stevens ("perhaps one could say that Stevens was a better poet than Heidegger and a better philosopher than Hölderin, and so found himself, in a manner, betwixt and between"). Humane and learned, Kermode's essays carry a lot of weight, to say nothing of circuitous asides and deep allusions; one has the sense throughout that someone who has read every book ever published is at work. Yet Kermode wears his learning lightly, and even takes a few good-natured shots at himself, as when he opens a rather dense piece on the theme of secrets and narrative sequence with the self-effacing remark, "My lecture could be called aridly academic, but I include it as a reminder that in the Seventies I spent much time devotedly doing this kind of thing." Fortunately, arid academicism for its own sake is seldom on view here. Instead, the reader is treated to splendid considerations of such matters as the rise and fall and rise of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli's renown, and its implications for the making of canons; the meaning of canons in general, and the promise that a canonical work contains "perpetual modernity"; and the twisted politics of writersof the 1930s, to name but a few topics that have taken Kermode's interest. Any critic who interprets a publisher's claim that a "lean" book means "very short, especially considering the price" is worth reading. Another feather in Kermode's wide-brimmed cap.