A sad history of a woman consumed by passion and despair.
Steamy sex in 1920s Paris.
When Berthault, the former French ambassador to Brunei, found a cache of love letters in a friend’s cellar, he became so fascinated that he bought them. This selection, lightly annotated, represents about a third of the “salacious” correspondence, written from 1928 to 1930, of Simone to her married lover, Charles, “something to be read,” Berthault suggests, “with the avid curiosity that an anachronistic pornographic novel might arouse.” Pornographic they are, and tediously repetitive as well, as Simone recounts the thrusting, licking, throbbing, and quivering of their lovemaking and tantalizes Charles with “the perverse ministrations” that she will offer at their next tryst. In the first months of the affair, they engage in oral and anal sex, and she delights in his beating her until she is raw and bleeding. “Do you know, you have so thoroughly whipped these buttocks you love,” she exults, that they are “one huge bruise.” She promises that one day, he will tie her wrists and ankles to the bedposts “and whip me furiously,” a prospect she thinks he ardently desires. Anticipating his desires becomes her way of proving her all-consuming love. “Did I not tell you I was your slave?” she asks. Hardly a sexually liberated woman, Simone reveals herself to be needy, neurotic, and hysterical, desperately afraid that Charles will leave her. “She would have made an ideal patient for Dr. Freud,” the editor comments. About six months into the affair, Simone decides that Charles secretly longs for a homosexual relationship, given his “taste for sodomy.” Charles, she says, will become her “mistress” and Simone the “man.” She even offers him a male lover, who, Berthault speculates, may have hastened the end of the affair. After two years, Charles was weary of his wild mistress.
A sad history of a woman consumed by passion and despair.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9877-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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