Overall, though, a provocative rendering of female genius wrestling for recognition in the male-dominated art world.
In a fictionalized treatment, the French sculptor looks back on her sometimes ecstatic, but mostly tortured life.
Bond, a retired Freudian psychoanalyst and author of a number of varied works, here focuses her psychoanalytic acumen on the complex character of a prominent late-19th- to early-20th-century artist whose achievements came at great personal cost. Claudel (1864–1943), now widely acknowledged as a brilliant sculptor, suffered much of her artistic life because of her romantic liaison with–and inevitable artistic comparison to–the philandering Auguste Rodin, hailed at the time as the greatest sculptor of his day. At first, Claudel benefited both professionally and personally from her relationship with Rodin, but when she realized he wasn’t going to leave his wife, the critics’ comments that she had copied the “master” began to gnaw at her fragile sanity; soon she loathed him with the fervor of her former affection, thinking he was out to claim her accomplishments as his own. Bond suggests this paranoia spurred a detachment from reality that prompted Claudel’s mother in 1913 to commit her to an insane asylum from which she would never emerge. Bond’s portrayal also illuminates other troubling aspects of Claudel’s story, including her charged relationship with her younger brother, Paul, another male uncontested “genius” in her life, as well as with her mother, who left her daughter in the asylum even when psychiatrists recommended in 1920 that Claudel be released and reintegrated with her family. While the author’s sympathetic and detailed account convincingly paints the struggles of the female artist, her reading of Claudel’s work as having sprung in a neat one-to-one relationship from her joy or trauma du jour is both reductive and reflective of a level of self-awareness that’s difficult to believe coming from a character writing from the madhouse.
Overall, though, a provocative rendering of female genius wrestling for recognition in the male-dominated art world.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-4241-1670-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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