MARINA: In Her Own Words

by Marina Sulzberger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 21, 1978

I don't see why to eat sleep work love and die without such trimmings as Proust, Bach's Toccata or Fugue, Dior, sole meuniere, Chanel No. 5 Shakespear and hot baths is morally better!"" Immensely adaptable (except to conventions of spelling and punctuation), Marina lived with and without those trimmings both before (in Greece) and after her WW II marriage to the New York Times' diplomatic correspondent. He has collected, connected, and annotated her letters to family and friends by way of memorial: Marina died two years ago at the age of 57. Multi-lingual, ever curious, always game, and astonishingly literate, she went everywhere and met everyone, from the Wall of Swat to Eisenhower and ""Mrs. lke""--and the Philippines' Mrs. Marcos, ""Lovely bewitching snowjobber of them all."" The book is packed with Marina's eclectic adventures and passionate responses; she reveled in her ""Greeky Greek extrovertness."" In ""driary"" Russia at the obligatory ballet: ""again that sad feeling of oldfashionness. Not old enough to be picturesque just terribly dÉmodÉe."" In Tashkent, the ""marvelous Omar Kayamish beards. But there the Omar Kayamishness stops. No flask of wine, the bread nothing to talk about and the wilderness remains wilderness enow."" Between summers in the Greece she adored, Christmases in Paris, visits to London where the children were in school, trips to New York and Washington (his business, her pleasure), Marina loyally went fishing with Cy who preferred solitude to society and roughing-it to servants. Marina wrote with humor, poignancy, indignation, sentimentality, depending on the subject and her mood: this might rewardingly have been a more analytical, less date-lined biography, but it could nor have been more affirmative in spirit.

Pub Date: Dec. 21, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1978

Categories: NONFICTION