A spiraling double-helix of a relationship whose sordid beauty fascinates even as it repels.
Appearing in what might be called a “sexography,” Sartre, the Nobel-winning existentialist philosopher, and Beauvoir, existentialist and pioneering feminist, cavort with a dizzying panoply of partners.
Seymour-Jones (Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, 2002, etc.) begins by switching her focus between her two principals; as their lives intertwine in a most sinuous way, so do the author’s paragraphs. Beauvoir refused to marry Sartre. In 1929, at the dawn of their relationship, he proposed several times. They shared an insatiable demand for fresh, and ever younger, sexual partners—in Beauvoir’s case, of both genders. Moreover, they sometimes shared partners, or siblings thereof, and Sartre kept a virtual harem, notes Seymour-Jones. Beauvoir countered by seducing a number of her young female students and fans, and she enjoyed a steamy relationship with Nelson Algren. Still, as the author shows, they were, in their self-absorbed ways, fiercely devoted to each other for a half-century, maintaining what they both termed a “morganatic marriage.” They are now buried together in a Paris cemetery. Seymour-Jones seems interested in their vast literary output only insofar as it illuminates their personal/sexual lives. Continually, she quotes scenes from their novels, plays and stories that parallel events revealed in their letters, journals and memoirs. The author’s admiration for her subjects gradually dwindles as their rise in the literary world involves them in numerous ethical and moral compromises. During the Occupation, for example, they both behaved in cowardly fashion. When they saw the imminent Allied victory, they shape-shifted—Sartre in particular, who portrayed himself thereafter as a hero of the Resistance. Later he became a feckless pawn of the Soviets, a role he did not surrender until the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
A spiraling double-helix of a relationship whose sordid beauty fascinates even as it repels.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59020-268-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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