Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> THE PUPPET CREATES delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood or become a tool of ritual magic able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things secretive inanimate while also full of spirit alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects-objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets onstage Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show the sacred shadow theater of Bali and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature-Collodi’s cruel wooden Pinocchio puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens Rilke’s puppet-angels the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath-as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature seducer and destroyer. demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things of the human and inhuman. (LL)