Fiercely intelligent, discomfortingly honest and never dull.
Now 91, one of England’s notable book editors examines life, old age and approaching death with astonishing candor in 16 essays distinguished by her spare, direct prose.
Athill (Yesterday Morning, 2002, etc.) does not shy away from uncomfortable subjects: the waning of sexual desire, her qualms about the physical act of dying and her atheism, which deprives her of a comforting belief in the hereafter. Although she knows that death cannot be far off, the present is full of quiet satisfactions. The tiny tree fern that she purchases in the opening essay will not provide shade for her backyard garden in her lifetime, but watching it unfurl its fronds becomes an unexpected and genuine pleasure. Athill vividly describes corpses she has seen and deaths she has witnessed, taking some comfort from the knowledge that among her close relatives the end has been relatively swift and peaceful. Having no children to care for her at the end of her life, she notes sadly but calmly that she will likely end her days in an impersonal institution. With no afterlife to look forward to, the present becomes more precious; hers is filled with reading, writing and reviewing books, gardening, drawing, pottering about and, surprisingly, driving her car. After a highway accident in which only the car was damaged, her love of the freedom provided by driving kept her behind the wheel. Erotic desire may have vanished, but Athill remembers it clearly and is quite candid about relationships with past lovers. Kindness and loving friendship are more important than sexual fidelity, she asserts, demonstrating this with brief anecdotes of her affairs. At the time of writing, she has reluctantly but dutifully become caretaker for a man she has lived with for nearly half a century. Their life now, she writes matter-of-factly, is “in about equal parts, both sad and boring.”
Fiercely intelligent, discomfortingly honest and never dull.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06770-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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