Cassimally (The Memoirs of Irene Adler, 2013, etc.) pens a fictionalized autobiography of the famed French actress.
In Cassimally’s version of Bernhardt’s life, she was born in mid-1800s France, the daughter of a courtesan and an unknown father. She was a Jew who wanted to be a nun, though her mother wished otherwise. Bernhardt was determined: “I was not going to make a living on my back”; but for a time, she did. She was a timid teen, convinced her first sexual experience would be her last. Her mother capitalized on her virginity—“what has been broken can be fixed”—and Bernhardt was thus visited by a woman named Madame Aglaë, who specialized in “revirginification.” Luckily, Bernhardt met a young man who boosted her self-esteem and stirred her passion. After garnering a contract with the Comédie-Française, a theater in Paris, she hoped for a career as an actress but was dismissed after slapping another performer. Eventually, she returned to the stage and found acclaim; she also slept in a coffin, was an accomplished sculptor, endured the amputation of a leg and was touted as “La Divine Sarah.” She crossed paths with celebrities of her time, including Bertie, Prince of Wales; Marcel Proust; Victor Hugo; and even Mary Lincoln. Presumably a fictionalized memoir without footnotes or sources, the book begins well, with Bernhardt’s thrice-lost virginity (thus the chapter title “How I Lost My Cherry, My Cherry, My Cherry”). Her amorous adventures are varied, with references to her “semi-lunes” (breasts) and her giving, and being given, a “pipe” (“tongue job”). Often accompanying the sexual acts are lovers’ emotional admissions, which tend to be more interesting than the relatively tame technicalities of sex. Bernhardt connects with individuals across the spectrum of society: Oscar Wilde (she told him she would cure him of his homosexuality, and he allegedly wrote Salome for her); the war-wounded men she tended, who were close to death yet capable of an erection; and even a Creole alleged murderer. There’s voice—a chatty tone prevails—but little depth. Ultimately, this is a series of scenes of Bernhardt’s many assignations interspersed with quotes, conversations and opinions.
At times spirited vignettes that eventually run out of steam.
Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499678109
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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