A pedophilic fantasy by the popular gay novelist (The Sex Offender, 1994, etc.) whose earlier work showed signs of a vivid imagination rather reluctantly reined in. Here, if hardly for the good, he pulls out all the stops. Most schoolteachers would consider it a tragedy to be fired for moral turpitude. But for narrator Matthew, it’s a good lead. Forced into a year’s leave of absence by irate parents who complain of a nonexistent —love affair— between him and their son, Matthew figures out that the lad is gay—and proceeds to seduce him after the fact. Then, when he’s given a paid leave, Matthew decides to change the scenery. His Seattle neighbor Herbert, a museum curator, is about to embark for Paris in an attempt to locate Picasso’s sketches of Gertrude Stein’s nephew Allan. Matthew and Herbert look uncannily alike, so Herbert allows Matthew to use his passport and go in his place. (Why Matthew couldn—t simply have gotten a cheap flight and cruised the bathhouses on his own is a question we—re apparently meant to suspend.) In Paris, Matthew becomes friendly with a family living down the hall, and he quickly falls in love with their teenaged son, StÇphane. It’s not long before he has StÇphane servicing him. Meanwhile, he tries to piece together the story of Allan Stein, whose strange and sad childhood in the homes of turn-of-the-century Paris intellectuals haunts Matthew almost as much as his search for the Picasso sketches does. In pursuit of the latter, Matthew leaves for the south of France—with StÇphane in tow. Eventually, StÇphane’s parents learn that Matthew is an imposter as well as a pedophile, but StÇphane has no regrets. The course of true love, for Matthew at least, is never straight. A hackneyed portrayal of gay lust: vacuous, pointless, and tasteless in the extreme.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1653-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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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