An unusual perspective illuminates a much written-about author.
A biography of George Orwell (1903-1950) based on his “obsessive relationship with smell.”
Having recently lost his sense of smell, Sutherland (Emeritus, English/Univ. College, London; A Little History of Literature, 2013, etc.) noticed that Orwell was hypersensitive to odors and loved the smell of farmyard animals and other “uplifting natural smells.” Although Sutherland asserts that it is possible to trace “scent narratives” in Orwell’s fiction, his “nasocriticism” rarely fulfills that project. Instead, Sutherland offers a brisk biographical overview, drawing in part from previous biographies that he admires: Bernard Crick’s, authorized by Orwell’s widow (1980), and later works by D.J. Taylor and Gordon Bowker, both published in 2003. Sutherland’s Orwell is awkward, cynical, and generally unsympathetic. He was a bright student, winning a scholarship to a prestigious prep school, and then went on to Eton, where he met two influential and wealthy young men who helped him to get published; one “immensely and discretely” supported him as he lay dying of tuberculosis. Poverty was a consistent theme in Orwell’s life and work. Sutherland does not dispute rumors that Orwell was a “flagellophile” who derived “a fetishized sexual thrill from the whip and being whipped,” nor that he went to Burma (“the biggest brothel in the Empire”) for sex; nor that he was attracted by “the androgynous beauty of the dominant Burmese race.” As a young man, he botched his relationship with a girlfriend by nearly raping her as they walked through the countryside, a landscape that Orwell found “wildly aphrodisiac.” When he finally married, in 1936, his mother told his new wife that she must be “a brave girl” to marry her son. The couple lived in an “uncomfortably primitive” house in a remote village, where they tried to farm. Sutherland offers three “smell narratives” as appendices, but, otherwise, few odors waft through the book.
An unusual perspective illuminates a much written-about author.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78023-648-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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