This detailed study of the author of Quartet and Wide Sargasso Sea seems not so much a biography as a collection of annotated note cards and unedited lecture notes. Rhys, born in 1890 in Dominica, the West Indies, had a Welsh father and a mother who was a Dominican Creole. The Creole influence would pervade her life and writing. At the age of 17, Rhys left Dominica to go to England, where she tried several careers—actor, chorus girl, artist's model—before she started to write. Her familiarity with the seedy side of London life is evident in her novels, many of which have the repeated theme of the helpless female, victimized by her dependence on a man for support and protection. Rhys had numerous love affairs throughout her long life; even at age 80, she enjoyed flirting with critic Alfred Alvarez, whose article about her in The New York Times Book Review on March 17, 1974, ``The Best Living English Novelist,'' made Rhys, briefly, a best seller. After several early novels such as After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) and Voyage in the Dark (1935), she stopped writing. Then she published Wide Sargasso Sea (1967), her story of the first marriage of Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Many of Rhys's novels have autobiographical origins, and Angier, an English writer and teacher, seems determined to connect every inhalation in Rhys's life with an exhalation in one of her novels. Thus, the reader stumbles through explanatory parentheses (as many as six a page), interspersed with speculative phrases (``I think''; ``Did she know? I doubt very much''; ``Would she have? Surely not''). Perhaps Angier's exhaustive but unsorted research will be of value to some future biographer who will do justice to Rhys, a fine writer.
Pub Date: June 3, 1991
ISBN: 0-316-04263-3
Page Count: 776
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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