The legendary and extraordinarily prolific Belgian novelist Georges Simenon is profiled in a detailed but surprisingly dry biography. Simenon, creator of the unforgettable Inspector Maigret mysteries, published over 400 books in his lifetime. Almost a decade after his death, his detective and psychological crime novels remain both popular and influential. Assouline, editor of the French magazine Lire, patiently chronicles the evolution of Simenon's style and sifts fact from fiction in the novelist's own memoirs. He examines Simenon's egocentric behavior and compulsive womanizing (he bragged of bedding ten thousand woman) with a noncensorious Gallic shrug. Assouline is at his best when uncovering suppressed areas of Simenon's life, such as his early anti-Semitic writings and his wartime near-collaboration. But for the most part the writer fails to come to life in this narrative, in which mountains of facts take the place of revealing anecdotes. Simenon took his business dealings as seriously as his writing, and Assouline follows suit by presenting his every contract negotiation in tedious detail. Rather than discussing Simenon's art while documenting his life, he saves his discussion of Simenon's body of work for one chapter awkwardly placed near the book's end. In addition, Assouline finds the key to understanding Simenon's character in his relationship with his daughter Marie-Jo, whose obsessive love for her father ultimately led to her suicide. But he hides this information until the last chapter of the book, when he springs it on the reader, acting rather like Maigret revealing some villainy. But playing detective novel tricks with a real family's tragedy comes across as coy at best, exploitative at worst. Assouline's biography fails to be what Simenon's novels almost always were: concise, perceptive, and readable. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-40285-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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