Readers interested in 19th- and early-20th-century society, especially that of the upper classes, will enjoy this picture of...
Nicolson (Abdication, 2012, etc.) traces seven generations of women connected to the Sackville Wests.
Beginning with her great-great-grandmother Pepita Duran (1830-1871), the flamenco dancer known as the Star of Andalusia, and her doting, if not smothering, mother, the author follows the relationship between mothers and daughters through the generations. Once diplomat Lionel Sackville-West fell under Pepita’s spell, she rejected her mother and lived as his mistress. She adored her illegitimate children despite being ostracized from polite society, including Lionel’s. When she died in childbirth in Arcachon, near Bordeaux, the children were scattered, until Lionel needed a hostess for his posting to the United States. His daughter Victoria stepped in and was a brilliant addition, winning her way into the society surrounding the estate at Knole. She married her cousin, who would inherit the estate, and the difficult birth of Vita ended any semblance of happiness in the marriage. Vita and Harold’s marriage was as happy as it was unconventional: both had lovers of the same sex, she more than he. Her son and daughter-in-law Philippa carried on the family, and Philippa extended the nonmaternal lines that had progressed through the years. This social history and story of family relationships is also the tale of Knole, the ancestral home, and its magnetic hold on those women. In the same light is the pull of Sissinghurst, the home bought by Vita and her husband, Harold, when she was unable, as a woman, to inherit Knole. The first half of the book portrays strong, if flawed, women, while the ending is more autobiographical and, while well-written, more cathartic than interesting.
Readers interested in 19th- and early-20th-century society, especially that of the upper classes, will enjoy this picture of the privileged life, “where loyalty, respect and equality are all held in the highest regard.”Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-17245-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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