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 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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