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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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