A grim reminder that tyrants have myriad ways to strangle dissent. (8 pp. b&w photos)
A gripping account of the final months of the Russian poet, who took her own life in 1941, at age 49, following the arrest and imprisonment by the Soviet secret police of her daughter, husband, and friends.
“Where is the truth?” asks Kudrova. And: “How true is it?” Newly translated from the Russian, this 1995 work (her third about Tsvetaeva, none reviewed) endeavors to answer these disturbing questions about the famous poet’s decision to hang herself in a small, somber house near Moscow. The author carefully reconstructs Tsvetaeva’s movements and imagines what she might have been feeling as her personal world imploded, the Russia she knew exploded (Nazi bombs were raining on Moscow), and the NKVD rounded up, interrogated, broke, and executed anyone who’d ever breathed, or even considered, an anti-Soviet sentiment. (Readers concerned about our own Patriot Act will recognize some ominous shadows flickering on the wall.) Kudrova begins in mid-June 1939 as the poet and her 14-year-old son were leaving France to return to the Soviet Union. Her husband, who had been working for Soviet intelligence in France, was already home. Husband and wife had not seen each other for 18 months; the NKVD would shoot him in 1941. Using their son’s diary, the KGB archives, letters (including three suicide notes) and other personal documents, interviews, and visits to key locations, Kudrova imagines the forces at work on Tsvetaeva. The author examines and modifies three published motives for the poet’s suicide: protecting her son, who by her death would perhaps be freed from subsequent government suspicion; yielding to mental illness (her mood had grown ever more fearful and saturnine); avoiding arrest herself by the NKVD and being forced to traduce her friends, even as they had falsely betrayed her family. Kudrova concludes by calling Tsvetaeva “another victim of the Great October Socialist Revolution.”
A grim reminder that tyrants have myriad ways to strangle dissent. (8 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-522-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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