Short on literary and historical perspective, Rayfield's exhaustive work nevertheless will be the definitive biography of Chekhov the private and family man. Rayfield, an established Chekhov scholar (Univ. of London), approached this project with a specific agenda: to offer an account specifically of his private life. Within this scope, Rayfield's goal is to provide a picture of Chekhov more complex than that suggested by other biographers or by the incomplete archival materials previously available. The cumulative impact of its 700 pages confirms Rayfield's claim that ``the complexity, selflessness and depth of the man become even clearer when we fully account for his human strengths and failings.'' This is a biography full of surprises. Although it is peppered with famous and colorful personalities such as the writers Gorky, Tolstoy, and Bunin, as well as figures from Russia's publishing and theater worlds, it is Chekhov's family members who make the most lasting impression: the tyrannical father, the bohemian and unreliable brothers, the dependent and jealous younger sister. The unexpected pleasure of Rayfield's biography is that the bountiful, sometimes overwhelming detail of Chekhov's private life—his own and his four siblings' habits, careers, movements, and finances—provide a fascinating and intimate look at this tendentious, temperamental family. As the extent to which Anton was his family's pivotal emotional figure and provider becomes clearer, one senses the value of Rayfield's endless evidence of financial arrangements, constant changes of domicile, and Anton's various real-estate adventures and debacles. The book suffers stylistically from too many mere listings. Still, Rayfield conveys what he succinctly states at the outset: Chekhov's life is, ``above all, a life enthralling for its own sake.'' Some may take issue with Rayfield's Joe Friday (``Just the facts, ma'am'') approach, but it will be difficult to fault or outdo his meticulous research. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5747-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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