Lever is the French editor of the Marquis de Sade's correspondence, and thus in a particularly good position to check and curb much of the mythical fervor that surrounds the writer everyone thinks he knows all about and almost no one does. By modern French surrealists and leftists, Sade has been championed as an archangel of revolution, of sexual revolt; by the general public, as evil and cruelty incarnate. The facts support both and neither, though Lever works upon the framework constructed most seminally by Gilbert Lely in the Fifties. Sade's noble Provencal family related to Petrarch; his feverish libertinage and real crimes of perversity; his first imprisonment (during which he wrote the first of his novels, The 120 Days of Sodom); his second imprisonment, during Robespierre's Terror; his authorial ambitions (not especially pure or demonic sometimes: Sade acknowledged the popular taste for ``spicy books'' when he was writing Justine); the two remarkable women who put up with him as wife, then companion; his rearrest and reimprisonment during the Napoleonic reaction to Jacobin excesses; the end of his days spent in the mental ``hospital'' at Charenton, where Sade ran the loony bin's semi- psychodrama theatricals. What Lever brings across, in a vigorous, unpedantic, well-translated style, is how much (and also how merely) a writer Sade would become—with the largeness and smallness that goes with it—after his aristocratic sexual frenzies burned themselves out early in life. Like many writers, Sade thought most about money. But nobleman that he was, he knew nothing about people; and Lever is right to mention (though the book is almost devoid of literary analysis) that Sade's greatest distinction as an imaginative writer was to create a self-contained repetitious rhythm—of impossible sexual acts that have no relation to what real people would do (or want to do)—the likes of which have never been repeated in prose. Demythologizing, level, and consistently fascinating. A must.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-20298-2
Page Count: 700
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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