More an intellectual history than a biography, this sweeping study explores the life and times of the self-invented and self- destroyed wit, philosopher, and playwright Chamfort (1740-94), whose aphoristic style and enigmatic personality influenced, among others, Nietzsche and Camus. Born the illegitimate son of an aristocrat and a canon, Chamfort was raised by a grocer, his beauty, wit, and charm ingratiating him with an aristocracy insatiable for the sexual and verbal prowess he exhibited. At age 25, this lover who had been called a ``Herculean Adonis'' suffered a disfiguring disease and, in a period famous for its furniture, fashion, and conversation, became a writer, entering the petty intellectual wars among the now forgotten wits and scribblers competing for a place in the French Academy. Although supported by noble patronage, Chamfort was allied with no one, and embodied the contradictions of the age—reason and passion, irony and sentiment, elitism and egalitarianism, a love of both civilization and of solitude. In 1789, he began to negotiate the conflicting and changing ideologies of the Revolution, in which he believed intensely. By 1791, he renounced his comforts, titles, and prerogatives for an austere life as a ``citizen,'' and in 1792 he became director of the Bibliothäque nationale, which he turned into a repository of national treasures. The following year, caught in the vagaries of revolutionary leadership and ideology, he attempted suicide rather than be imprisoned for his defense of Charlotte Corday (assassin of Jean Paul Marat)—an act that left him alive but hideously mutilated. Chamfort died several months later, a ``cultural double agent'' as Arnaud (Art and History/Centre Pompidou, Paris) calls him: both participant and spectator, aristocrat and populist—but, above all, an enigma, a stranger, an ``exemplary case of illegitimacy.'' In his foreword, Joseph Epstein describes the peculiar conditions—sociological, psychological, philosophical, political- -that create the aphorist. In his careful analysis of every stage in Chamfort's metamorphosis and the worlds in which he lived, Arnaud re-creates those conditions and gives them credibility. (Fifteen halftones—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-226-02697-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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