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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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