To ``reinstate a colleague'' and ``resurrect another woman,'' Gray, novelist (October Blood, 1985) and journalist (Soviet Women, 1990), has composed a life and sexual history of Colet (1810-76), poet, political and fashion journalist, dramatist, and muse to Flaubert, by whom, after their tempestuous affair, she was immortalized as Madame Bovary. Born in the provinces, motivated by fictional romances, Colet ran off to Paris with an impoverished musician (to this day, her descendants, who have turned the family home into a golf resort, continue to disown her). In the heady world of salons, artists, and writers such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Alfred de Musset, the newcomer flourished as poet and dramatist. She had considerable renown when she met the unknown Flaubert, 11 years her junior, repressed, sexually conflicted, and syphilitic, who seduced her in hansom cabs, made fetishes of her slippers and hair, obsessed over her letters and then, in one dramatic moment, burned them all. The affair was brief, followed by a seven-year friendship, and here it's Flaubert's life, travels, opinions, and explicitly sexual letters (indeed, everyone's explicitly sexual letters) that take up most of the biography. There are informative side-essays on Parisian women, 19th-century women writers, and men's sexual relations—as well as interesting digressions on venereal disease and on sodomy in Egypt, where Flaubert traveled—making up a cultural history of sexual practices. Sadly, except for tantalizing allusions to Charlotte Corday and The Last Cleric—a scandalous attack on the Catholic Church—and some translations of her poetry, Colet's reputation as a ``literary star'' and feminist is obscured by her sexual history. A vivid and absorbing account—but Colet is as unsympathetic as Madame Bovary, remaining an unknown, misguided figure of unfulfilled passions and talents, a heroine in a naughty novel, famous for the scenes she made and the men she loved.
Pub Date: March 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-74238-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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