Slim, fragmented memories of the daughter that Lacan and readers barely knew.
A brief memoir in snapshots by the daughter of famed French psychologist Jacques Lacan.
By the time Sibylle Lacan (1940-2013) was born, her father had not only abandoned her mother and siblings; he had another daughter on the way. The author and her siblings would retain their father’s surname, but he officially erased all mention of them from his professional life, from his listing in Who’s Who, and even from his office, where he had a single photo of his youngest daughter with his second wife: “To his patients, to us, to me, for over twenty years, my father seemed to be saying: Here is my daughter, my only daughter, here is my darling daughter.” Since her father was already gone from the household by the time of her birth, and their relationship ever after was sporadic, his presence in her life was mainly an absence, which became a black hole of depression: “Impossible to study, to learn, to recall,” she writes. “Always the same weariness, that foggy sensation, the same absence of emotion. My life was hell.” She wanted her father to save her, but the best he could do was to refer her to other analysts. “He was an intermittent father,” she writes. “A father in fragments.” This choppy memoir is as much about the author’s own emotional disappearance into the ether as her father’s presence or absence in her life. Many of the passages are less than a page, a paragraph of a couple of sentences; very few extend over more than two pages. For the author, closure only came after her father’s death—despite a “doubly sinister” funeral in which her own family felt like bit players. Several years later, she visited his grave, “laid my hand on the icy stone until it burned,” and finally felt reconciliation.
Slim, fragmented memories of the daughter that Lacan and readers barely knew.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-262-03931-4
Page Count: 104
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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