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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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