Last night I dreamed of . . . a Daphne du Maurier whose works were “startlingly brilliant,” peopled with “most unsavory” men and “defective” women, and whose exegesis here is shrouded in literary fog. In this inaugural volume in a new series of —Personal Takes,— Auerbach (history and literature/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Our Vampires, Ourselves, 1995, etc.) begins with an interesting enough thesis: that the prolific du Maurier (17 novels, 6 biographies, 2 plays, and a dozen collections of articles and stories), now best known for the Alfred Hitchcock movie versions of her novel Rebecca and her sinister short story “The Birds,” is unfairly categorized as a writer of “romances” in which suffering heroines fall into the arms of masterful males and live happily ever after. In fact, in tales with male narrators like The Scapegoat and “Hungry Hill” (among the author’s favorites), her protagonists are killers, albeit otherwise dependent and inadequate men; the women, however feisty they may seem, are destined to have “something gone wrong inside,” whether it be uterine cancer (Rebecca) or paralysis (The King’s General). As if that weren’t depressing enough, novels are further described as “unabashedly dull” (The Glassblowers) or “grim” (Jamaica Inn), and du Maurier herself as —weird.— The influence of du Maurier’s family (which included her grandfather George, the popular author of Trilby and creator of Svengali, whose literary talent Daphne is “heiress” to), plus themes of incest, lesbianism, anti-Semitism, and “boyishness” (viz. Peter Pan), are analyzed at length. The discussion is frequently muddled and contradictory (at different points, du Maurier was and was not influenced by the Brontâ sisters). A concluding chapter revisits the films, especially Hitchcock’s, excoriating most of them for reducing intense and often ugly emotional conflicts to clichéd romance. A valiant but unconvincing effort to resuscitate du Maurier to literary respectability.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8122-3530-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
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