In a richly allusive and imaginative portrait, Schmidgall (Literature as Opera and Shakespeare as Opera) analyzes the aspects of Oscar Wilde's life, character, reputation, and performance as a gay man living in the closing decade of the 19th century from the perspective of contemporary, post-Stonewall gay culture. Charming illustrations and apt quotes from Punch, Wilde himself, his friends and enemies, and historical and literary figures from Catullus to Joyce Carol Oates view Wilde from myriad perspectives, illuminating what he was (tall, fashionable, quotable) and how he appeared (a fallen angel or devil, effete or refined, pariah or hero), a paradox who loved paradoxes. Schmidgall shows him in various roles: Socrates and Hamlet, martyr and tragic hero, acrobat, clown, trespasser, aesthete, a reflection of his mother, an abysmal husband, a neglectful father, the perennial child writing fairy tales, and, for lack of a term for homosexual, an ``ass-thete,'' pederast, seducer who liked young men without hair from the lower classes. Schmidgall traces the legal history behind Wilde's ``crime,'' his sexual practices, his friends, and his decision to face a trial rather than escape—one of the first self-outings, a Socratic confrontation. In a clever chapter he compares Wilde's ideas to Neitzsche's transgressive philosophy against conventional morality. Similarly, he offers an extended analysis of the ``sublime'' and Shakespearean dimensions of Wilde's ``tragedy,'' raising him to an heroic level. Wilde's ``sin,'' he concludes, became the basis of a new civilization, a civilization in which, if he still survived, he would live in San Francisco working as a book commentator, staunchly PC, a feminist, reviling the vulgarity of contemporary celebrities and the inadequate responses to AIDS. Most likely, he would also applaud this book, a fanciful and operatic production.
Pub Date: April 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93763-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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