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FAREWELL, MY ONLY ONE

The story is much better told in Helen Waddell’s deservedly popular 1933 classic Peter Abelard.

One of history’s great loves is reexamined by a former French publishing executive.

Here, the tale of Heloise and Abelard is narrated by the fictional William of Oxford, an itinerant young copyist whose wanderings take him, in 1116, to the abbey of Fontrevault and two life-altering encounters. The first is with eminent scholar-teacher-theologian Peter Abelard, who has by his 40th year become both revered and reviled for the matchless rational powers that take the forms of “his audacity and his blasphemous comparisons.” The second is with the beautiful Heloise, niece and ward of powerful Canon Fulbert—with whom William falls instantly and unrequitedly in love. Over the succeeding years, repressing his yearnings, William becomes Abelard’s devoted disciple and a pained witness to the great teacher’s passionate appropriation of the willing Heloise, herself possessed of an intellect as powerful and hungry as is the romantic desire Abelard stirs in her. As William moves in and out of Abelard’s orbit, the famous story is told: of the lovers’ “secret marriage” and the birth of their son; Canon Fulbert’s violent revenge (the castration of his niece’s seducer); Abelard’s distracted transformation from argumentative rebel into “a man of God who has been punished but purified”; and the years of separation, ending with Abelard’s death and Heloise’s renunciation of the world as she becomes a respected abbess. Audouard has researched his materials impeccably and constructed a sometimes affecting but otherwise middling narrative. The problem is William. Audouard’s emphasis on his emotions distracts attention from his lovers—and William’s arbitrary journeys and meetings never become anything but storytelling strategies. Only at end, when the celebrated exchange of letters from which the world knows of Heloise and Abelard is finally acknowledged, do we understand why Audouard created this really unnecessary character.

The story is much better told in Helen Waddell’s deservedly popular 1933 classic Peter Abelard.

Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2004

ISBN: 0-618-15286-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...

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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

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