A profound look at an important French literary era, told with verve and wisdom.
Brown’s exhaustive biography of the great French stylist is a natural companion to his smart, significant Zola (1995).
To get to the recalcitrant core of Croisset’s famous hermit, the reader has to toil considerably over the hurdles of Norman history, specifically around Rouen, its famous cathedral, and its hospital at the Hôtel-Dieu, where Flaubert’s father was an attending surgeon. Younger son Gustave, a law student, was ultimately saved from the drudgeries of that bourgeois profession when he fell off his horse in 1844, presumably after an attack of epilepsy. Ensconced in the family retreat at Croisset to quietly study and write, he first embarked on L’Éducation sentimentale, based on his friendship with Maxine Du Camp (and not published for 20 years). He made formative acquaintances with critic Louis Brouilhet (“the audience for whom he wrote his books”) and famous poet and beauty Louise Colet, who would inspire the adulterous Emma Bovary. (“He hardly knew whether their lovemaking had been a climax or an ordeal,” notes Brown.) Ever thorough, the biographer painstakingly guides readers through the intricacies of the Revolution of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871; the antics of lusty, young Flaubert and Du Camp as they traveled through Egypt; and the years of excruciating deliberation that produced Madame Bovary. Brown does a particularly effective job of presenting the government’s prosecution of Madame Bovary, after its serialization in La Revue de Paris, as “harmful to public morals” and of analyzing Flaubert’s complex reaction to his acquittal. The biographer seizes on each of his subject’s writings with literary avidity, incorporating a great swath of background and personalities. Brown offers as well generous selections from Flaubert’s work and from the incomparable letters he exchanged in middle age with his maternal friend, George Sand.
A profound look at an important French literary era, told with verve and wisdom.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-11878-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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