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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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