A palpable, engrossing portrait of three extraordinary women and their tempestuous, fragile world.
A captivating triple biography reveals the women who inspired Marcel Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes.
In his seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, Proust drew on his astute observations of Parisian high society: the dazzling glamour, effete customs, and, as he increasingly noted, superficiality and banality. Focusing on three alluring women who were objects of Proust’s fascination, Weber (French and Comparative Literature/Barnard Coll.; Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, 2006, etc.) portrays in rich detail a French aristocracy threatened by profound social and political change. Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus (widow of the composer Georges Bizet); Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné (a descendent of the Marquis de Sade); and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Vicomtesse Greffulhe were the grandes dames who fueled Proust’s “dream of patrician elegance and grace.” Each assiduously developed “a conscious strategy of self-promotion,” honing a distinctive image to achieve recognition and admiration. Élisabeth traded on her beauty, wearing only clothing “designed by her and for her.” Laure, with a particular talent for self-aggrandizement and tireless indulgence for “wild nights” at the notorious Chat-Noir, made sure to publicize her Sadean lineage. Geneviève, who entertained wearing “silky, mauve peignoirs,” had a reputation as “the neurasthenic queen of Montmartre.” Each was married, unhappily, and strived for some measure of independence at a time when women “had the legal status of minors.” As Élisabeth wrote, “women are meant to be trophies, pretty possessions….Smiling, placid, charming. Not leaving the nest, staying in the aviary.” Weber offers intimate details of their love affairs, betrayals, friendships, and rivalries; their worries over money and status; and their “grappl[ing] with mental illness and drug addiction.” She recounts vividly the plush ambience, dress, and décor of their châteaux and palaces as well as the parties and salons peopled by royalty, artists, and writers who mesmerized the young, aspiring, impressionable Proust.
A palpable, engrossing portrait of three extraordinary women and their tempestuous, fragile world.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-307-96178-5
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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