A lightly investigative biography about a painting’s provenance and its hidden romantic history.
A breezy bit of art history about a 1939 affair between the author’s father and Frida Kahlo in Paris.
Combining both research and conjecture, photographer and documentary filmmaker Petitjean attempts to retrace the circumstances of this underdocumented romance. Frida visited Paris in 1939; she left an adulterous Diego Rivera back in Mexico and found herself on an emotional threshold before her European debut in André Breton’s exhibition of Mexican art. While Breton and other surrealists fetishized her foreignness, Michel Petitjean, the author’s father and local gallerist, saw beyond that surface impression. Michel and Frida had a short affair, during which she gave him a small painting called The Heart, which was a fitting token for the man who, for once, saw all of her. The painting, writes the author is “a concentration of the key characteristics in [her] art and her biography: intimacy, identity, physical and psychological suffering, references to Mexican culture, and references to art history.” While the story is transportive and dreamy, the author’s awkward sequencing of facts and loose creative license muddle the scholarly authority. For example, Petitjean doesn’t explain until near the end of the narrative that his father studied Mexican civilizations at the Museum of Ethnography. Stylistically, he often embellishes: He remarks on the subtle implications of Breton’s “tone of voice” and, elsewhere, imagines mental pictures in his father’s mind. He also writes that, one morning during a pain spell, Frida “contemplates each of her organs in turn.” Petitjean is undeterred by a lack of concrete sources: “I do not have any information to know for sure…but by cross-checking the whereabouts, circumstances, and personalities of the protagonists I will attempt to reconstruct the scene.” While prefacing another tangent, he writes, “I imagine, but I may be wrong.” While his heart’s in the right place, the author’s penchant for stylized prose often overwhelms the book’s more academic qualities.
A lightly investigative biography about a painting’s provenance and its hidden romantic history.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-990-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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