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
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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