Strong potential, poor execution.
An 18th-century affair in Venice revealed in the lovers’ myriad letters, some only recently discovered.
The story seems to contain all the necessary elements for a riveting tale: a beautiful young woman, a charming, upwardly mobile Venetian politician, forbidden love, clandestine meetings, help from Casanova (yes, that one), covert correspondence, a surprise pregnancy, a suspicious mother, treacherous servants, seclusion in a convent, a mystery child who disappears from history, a republic in decline—and, remarkably, so many extant letters. Some had been previously archived due to the protagonists’ modest historical importance: Giustiniana Wynne, an Anglo-Venetian of illegitimate birth (and thus unable to marry above her without some political machinations), had gone on to write several books; and her lover, Andrea Memmo, had nearly won the office of doge. The author’s father, a descendant of Memmo, had recently uncovered in the old family palazzo even more letters that had lain untouched for centuries, but he did not live to realize his dream of writing about the affair. Now di Robilant, an Italian journalist, has completed the project to problematic effect. The main difficulty is the narration; the author cannot decide how to approach the subject. At times it reads like a romance novel (“she was radiant in her brocaded evening cape”), at others like a memoir, an epistolary novel, a strangely prudish biography, or an informal cultural history. Sometimes di Robilant summarizes the letters, sometimes he prints lengthy excerpts that too often fail to do more than reveal the banality of the situation and the vacuousness of the lovers. Despite a few provocative details—Andrea sent letters containing semen samples and confessed anxieties about excessive masturbation—the tone is generally bland; even Casanova comes across as a rather dull bird on a bare branch.
Strong potential, poor execution.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41181-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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