Reflections and Shadows

This is the delightful little memoir of Saul Steinberg, translated from the italian by John Shepley. Its great value is that it is the closest we will ever come to reading the work of one of America's great literary talents. Now it's become a pretty commonplace observation that Steinberg is as appropriate a nominee for the literary hall of fame as he is for the graphic artists'. This is the little book that seals the deal. It turns out that Steinberg's aphoristically-turned phrases are as clear and concise as his drawings. This book is sadly, all he wrote. Steinberg did not intend this to be a personal disclosure- he is a man who had his memoir written by somebody else. And yet, it turns out that the very tightness of phrasing gives the man away. What did he learn of Milan when he was there? Not much. "My chief interest then was girls. .I was looking... .to find myself through love." There are a few drawings here, all of them small and printed just well enough to make you wish they were printed better. If you are amoung the unconverted and want to catch examples of his drawing see the wonderful exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York or one of the great collections (my favorite is Passport). But for true believers, Reflections is Steinberg's literary love song, a book that puts him in the company of Borges. --Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN 9781601640005

Published after his death in 1999, this is a meditation based on a series of interviews of Steinberg by Buzzi. Beginning with his childhood and youth in Romania, through his wartime experience in Italy and his maturity in the United States, Steinberg muses with an acute visual sense, appropriate for an artist. The book is illustrated with his drawings. His ideas about influences on art are insightful. as he describes early photographers "inspired by the paintings of Delacroix and Ingres", to his thought that Bacon "clearly derives from the Polaroid". I was intrigued by his suggestion that the use of industrial paints in American art occurred because of poor artists used cold-water flats as studios, "and to make them livable they had to scrape and paint the walls, doors and windows, and floors . . . and this led them to work on a large scale, to use industrial paints, such as gold or silver on radiators, new materials". His description of the New York City taxi cab of the `40's as created out of Cubist elements, of the automobile influenced by Constructivism, Cubism, and "Fernandlégerism" makes one look at cars in a whole new light. The title, Reflections and Shadows, comes from a section in which he discusses how what one sees in reverse in a reflection (in a mirror, in water) or shadow is often better - sharper, more intense - than the original. "If you look only at the reflection, and not at the reflecting part, you see a gratuitous reality that exists for you alone. For fun I throw a stone into the upside-down landscape, and seeing that the lower part moves I almost expect the upper part to move too." If I quoted all my favorite parts of this book, I'd be typing almost the entire thing, so you'll have to go read it for yourself!

The autobiographical musings of a New Yorker cartoonist told to his old friend, and filled with wit, humanity and philosophical gems. Stories of escaping from the fascist police in Italy, too lazy to brutally arrest people at the usual invisible ungodly hour. Or civic life in 1950s Washington, and the charming people who knew exactly how to be courteous and to dismiss those who didn't belong. Or the poor white in kentucky, like protagonists out of American fiction, whereas the bourgeoisie, respectable people, "always the same". And Magritte's discovery of multiple sources of light in a painting (sun, streetlamp, electric light inside a house, the moon, reflections of light. Or American gastronomy, in which "the taste of the nation are governed by the tastes of children".