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
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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