Simply, gracefully and wisely written, saturated with the sorrows and joys of years.
A writer searches out the significant sites in the life of Ivan Turgenev and ponders love, obsession, creation and literary celebrity.
No bald description can do justice to this moving and poignant work, the latest from Dessaix, whose memoir Night Letters (1997) showed how artfully he can intertwine the mundane and miraculous. An Australian who now lives in Tasmania, Dessaix first became interested in Russia and its language in the 1950s, when Sputnik was beeping overhead. Not many years afterward, he lived and studied in the Soviet Union and became a noted scholar (Turgenev: The Quest for Faith, 1980). Here, he begins his account in Baden-Baden (where the great novelist lived for a time), then travels to France and Russia to visit the places where Turgenev resided, wrote, loved, suffered and died (not all the sites are extant). He sees, as well, places where his characters played out their parts—staircases they descended, restaurants they frequented. Dessaix is fascinated with Turgenev’s 40-year passion for the singer Pauline Viardot-García, a married woman of ordinary if not homely looks. Turgenev lived near (and even with) her for long periods, enjoying her husband’s company, as well. Dessaix believes there was no sexual contact between the writer and Pauline—but there was patent eroticism. Along the way, the traveler and author contemplates some of life’s great conundrums, the pains and pleasures undergone by Turgenev and, for that matter, by all of us. He summarizes relevant passages from the novels—both the well-known and the unknown—and, along the way, examines his own successes and failures in intimacy. Some of his sentences are surpassingly lovely (Turgenev’s “single theme,” he writes, “refracting a single flame: I love you, yet we must die”). Dessaix also takes some amusing potshots at hunters and at the excessively credulous and pious. And he resolves to reread Turgenev.
Simply, gracefully and wisely written, saturated with the sorrows and joys of years.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59376-063-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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