Tough but rewarding, written with bold intelligence and panache.
An intellectually challenging and sometimes obscure assessment of the life and influence of French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), whose poetry and critical essays made him a founding father of modernism.
Italian novelist and critic Calasso (Tiepolo Pink, 2009, etc.) demands a lot of his readers, studding his prose with arcane references and using words like “hesychastic” and “scotoma.” If he lacks the lucidity of Robert Hughes or Jed Perl, however, it isn’t because he’s just being willfully obtuse. He’s an ambitious artist-critic, pushing the subject as far as he can, bent on penetrating the mind of both Baudelaire and his time. In the process, he delivers plenty of insight. He captures the impact of Baudelaire’s “supreme prose work,” The Painter of Modern Life, an act of “blatant provocation” that held up an unknown illustrator, Constantin Guys, as the artistic model of his day. For Baudelaire, the anonymous Guys could depict whatever he wanted without worrying about patrons or prestige, giving him a total freedom that Manet or Ingres would never have. “In perspective,” writes the author, “this meant ousting painting from its sovereign position and admitting that something no less indispensable...had come from disreputable illustration or—an even greater scandal, this—from photography.” In 18th-century France, the word folie referred to a garden pavilion, “a place of fancies and sensuality.” Baudelaire created a folie of his own, one that stood in opposition to a society on the decline. The word would be his legacy. “Modern—new—décadence: three words that radiate from Baudelaire’s every sentence, every breath,” writes Calasso. “To separate them would be to bleed them white.”
Tough but rewarding, written with bold intelligence and panache.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-18334-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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