This sprawling narrative of Paul Gauguin's messy life provides new insights, despite its lack of formal coherence. Sweetman (Mary Renault, 1993; Van Gogh, 1990) names the three sections of his book after the three questions posed by a late Gauguin masterpiece's title: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Gauguin's origins make for a fascinating story. His mother, born into French feminist and radical circles, was for a time cared for by George Sand. Family connections led Gauguin's parents to emigrate to Peru; his father didn't survive the trip. Gauguin soon returned to France with his mother; Sweetman shows how the Peruvian experience would nevertheless inform the artist's aesthetic sensibility. Gauguin came late to painting as a career. He worked as a sailor before making, and then losing, a great deal of money in investment banking. The latter enterprise, provided Gauguin with an entrÇe to the Impressionist circles where he would serve his apprenticeship; Pissarro, in particular, became a mentor. Sweetman exhaustively details Gauguin's associations with CÇzanne, MallarmÇ, Seurat, and Van Gogh. Gauguin's Danish wife, from whom he became estranged, and his many mistresses also find illumination. Sweetman explores at length the degraded physical condition, confused philosophizing, and glorious artistic productions that characterized Gauguin's visionary last years in the South Pacific. The significance of the expatriate's work remained in dispute until the results of his famous late-life relocation to Tahiti were exhibited in France. Sweetman suggests, in his last section, that the ``we'' whom Gauguin invoked in his painting's title includes us. We follow Gauguin in our ambivalence toward the modern vices- -money worship, misogyny, and colonialism. If Gauguin did not succeed in getting beyond these vices, neither have we, Sweetman suggests. And if Sweetman doesn't entirely succeed in maintaining his narrative focus, he does provide a biography that brings our own time into clearer view along with that of his subject. (color and b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80941-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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