The sublime poet's selfish character, impulsive amours, and artistic development recounted in illuminating detail. ``Rilke was a jerk,'' wrote poet John Berryman in his Dream Songs. Freedman's fine-grained new biography of the great German poet bears out Berryman's uncharitable judgment, albeit with considerably more decorum and nuance. Freedman, a retired professor of comparative literature (Princeton Univ.; Hermann Hesse, 1979) explores the poet's life and art in rich detail. Born in Prague in 1875, Rilke soon left the Austro-Hungarian provinces behind him in his steady rise to the uppermost echelons of the European art world. Freedman paints a picture of the artist as ruthless young aesthete: the heartless self-absorption in constructing his poetic persona, the fawning over aristocrats—especially potential benefactresses—and the near-indifference to the wife and daughter he abandoned in order to better follow his calling. There is ample opportunity for moralizing here. Happily, Freedman does not fall into the trap, giving the full measure of Rilke's personal shortcomings without needless clucking. Instead, he soberly pursues his larger aim, which is to illuminate Rilke's ``long struggle for the style that would ultimately define him.'' Freedman quotes generously (though exclusively in translation) from Rilke's poetry to reveal not only its relationship to the poet's personal experience but also, more importantly, to follow the development of his craft from its origins in the purple kitsch of his youth to the powerful and unique lyric idiom of his maturity. Freedman is particularly good on Rilke's relationship to Rodin and to the visual arts in general, which helped to shape the poet's sense of a new direction in poetry. A fine study that is scholarly yet readable and admirably brings the poet's feckless life into balance with his artistic achievement. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-18690-1
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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