``All his life, Wilkie Collins was haunted by a second self,'' begins this briskly authoritative portrait of the greatest of all the Victorian sensationalists—and British academic Peters (Thackeray's Universe, 1987—not reviewed) convincingly applies her thesis both to Collins's life and his work. Certainly Collins's notorious private life invites the revisionary interpretation Peters shares with W. M. Clarke's Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (1991—not reviewed) and William Palmer's novel The Detective and Mr. Dickens (1990). Unlike the properly bourgeois Dickens, who labored to keep his affair with Ellen Ternan secret, Collins lived openly for many years with his common-law wife Caroline Graves while carrying on an equally open liaison with the young servant Martha Rudd—and acknowledged the children of both women as his own. Peters traces Collins's scorn for the hypocrisy of Victorian social convention—he was a far more steadfast and consistent opponent of Podsnappery than Dickens—to an early infatuation with continental mores that, in his novels, is transformed into a fascination with the problem of personal identities thrown into question by doubles, dreams, hallucinations, and guilty secrets. Determined that his own ``other self'' should escape the trap of marriage and respectability, Collins rooted the sensational plots of his best novels, from The Woman in White to The Moonstone, in a closely observed critique of English prudery and provincialism that Peters aptly compares to the work of Balzac and Flaubert, ascribing the decline of Collins's later novels—which lack the ``mythic, fairy-tale quality'' of his earlier syntheses of melodramatic nightmares and social pathology—to the dating of his call for change, overtaken by spreading literacy and feminine empowerment. Peters persuasively recasts Collins's sensationalism as a prophetic social modernism that explains both his meteoric rise and his later decline. Seldom has a novelist so completely expressed, in both life and art, the contradictions of his moment. (Photographs)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-691-03392-7
Page Count: 523
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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