A sensitive recounting of a writer’s doomed fantasy.
Passion, frustration, and anger erupted in Ernest Hemingway’s last years.
In 1948, visiting Venice with his wife, Mary, Hemingway (1899-1961) fell madly in love with 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich. Di Robilant (Chasing the Rose: An Adventure in the Venetian Countryside, 2014, etc.) draws on memoirs (including Adriana’s), letters, and biographies to reconstruct the relationship—platonic, the author believes—and its impact on Hemingway’s marriage, writing, and career; and on Adriana, whose behavior was circumscribed by Venetian society’s “rigid rules of moral conduct.” Meeting her around town, Hemingway seemed oblivious to the malicious gossip he was generating for Adriana and her family. He made no effort to conceal his feelings: One friend was shocked to see him “drool unashamedly over Adriana.” Mary was willing to tolerate his infatuation as long as it remained platonic; it “was a price she was willing to pay if it made her husband happy and a nicer person to be around.” But his happiness often did not extend to his treatment of Mary; compared with Adriana, she seemed “drab” and “increasingly irritating.” The marriage was rocky, exploding into violent quarrels. The tension mounted after Adriana, at Hemingway’s insistence, joined the couple at their home in Cuba. There, Mary read the galleys for Across the River and into the Trees, about an older man remembering his adoration for a younger woman, obviously modeled on Adriana. Mary deeply disliked the novel, as did many reviewers when it appeared in 1950. His next novel, The Old Man and the Sea, a book encouraged by Adriana, was more warmly received. Like many other biographers, di Robilant portrays Hemingway as pathetic, petulantly envious of other writers’ successes, often enraged and cruel, and suffering from depression, illnesses, injuries, and the deleterious effects of a lifetime of hard drinking. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, he was too ill to travel to Sweden. He killed himself in 1961, and Adriana, after suffering decades of depression, killed herself some two decades later.
A sensitive recounting of a writer’s doomed fantasy.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-94665-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
