DeSalvo (Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, 1989) demonstrates that when the act of creation is also one of revenge, the primal ooze of literature can be extremely foul. But her project begs the underlying question for literary criticism of the relation between a writer's life and work. DeSalvo examines four authors who turned family and friends into characters in their fiction. Before Leonard and Virginia Woolf's marriage settled into an exemplary working partnership, it went through a poisonous phase; he published The Wise Virgins, which attacked the way Virginia ``looked, talked, and thought,'' satirized and rewrote scenes from her novel The Voyage Out, and fictionally erased their marriage when the ``Leonard'' character decided not to marry the ``Virginia'' character. When D.H. Lawrence became disenchanted with his friend Lady Ottoline Morell, he created a contemptuous portrait of her as Women in Love's Hermione Rodrice. Although Bloomsbury gossips (and his wife, Frieda, whose dislike for Ottoline was returned in kind) were delighted, Ottoline was crushed and humiliated. During the first 18 years of her life Djuna Barnes had no contact with people outside her family, which, DeSalvo reports, practiced incest, ritual rape, group sex, spirit possession, bestiality, and forced voyeurism. Although her early works referred obliquely to these events, it was not until her mother died that Barnes penned her most autobiographical work, The Antiphon, exploring the horrors inflicted on children by their own parents. Henry Miller's obsession with his dark muse and second wife, June (and her insistence that a former Western Union clerk could become a writer), dragged them through an emotionally explosive and mutually exploitative relationship during which her work as a prostitute barely maintained them in grinding poverty. A work that reveals a disturbing fascination with the rottenness at the core of some literature and delivers it with the relish of a tabloid.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93899-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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