Duplessis’ string of lovers was sufficiently fascinating to become the basis of books, plays and Verdi’s opera. As a...
Intelligent Life contributing editor Kavanagh (Nureyev: The Life, 2007, etc.) attempts to sort out the biography of the short-lived Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis (1824–1847).
We know her as Violetta in La Traviata, but she was Marguerite in Alexander Dumas’ The Lady of the Camellias and Alphonsine when she was born in 1824 Normandy. In the ways of the 19th-century French, when a girl became a courtesan, she was to have an apartment, jewels, equipage, a very generous allowance and often tutoring in the finer ways of society. For Duplessis, however, “this was far more than Pygmalion or Pretty Woman transformation,” writes Kavanagh. “The country waif, scarcely able to read or write when she arrived in the capital at the age of thirteen, was presiding over her own salon seven years later, regularly receiving aristocrats, politicians, artists, and many of the celebrated writers of her day.” Lacking Duplessis’ correspondence, the author depends on the accounts of contemporary authors and one of her subject’s childhood friends, as well as the book and play by Dumas. Determining her age in the period when her father apprenticed her to a laundry, gave her to the gypsies, “sold” her to a debauching septuagenarian and “lost” her in Paris proves daunting. Too often, the author refers to Duplessis as Marguerite or Alphonsine and to her lovers by their pseudonyms; the time and places change without warning. Duplessis was quick to adapt to the culture of love in Paris with frequent changes of lovers—so many, in fact, that it’s difficult to keep track. The fact that many of her men overlapped adds to the confusion, as do the many references to men identified only by initials or pseudonyms.
Duplessis’ string of lovers was sufficiently fascinating to become the basis of books, plays and Verdi’s opera. As a chronicle of French life, Kavanagh’s book is great fun; as biography, it’s scattered.Pub Date: June 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-27079-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
