An engrossing, intimate, and deeply empathetic portrayal of a brilliant and enigmatic woman. The book won the 2009 Prix...
Exploring the palimpsest of a literary life.
Forrester (The Economic Horror, 1999, etc.), a French journalist, novelist, critic, and translator who died in 2013, has created a nuanced, impassioned portrait of Woolf (1882-1941) refracted through her most intimate relationships: notably, with her parents, Julia Duckworth and Leslie Stephen; her husband, Leonard; and her sister, Vanessa. Noting that there are many detailed studies of Woolf, Forrester is interested not in reprising the trajectory of her subject’s life and work but rather in rescuing her from “countertruths” perpetuated by “all the entangled lives, the secrets, the lies, the dramatic misunderstandings” that emerged from memoirs, letters, diaries, and some of her biographers. She particularly excoriates Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew and first biographer, for his “condescending tone, speaking of his aunt while scotomizing the writing, whose work, as he was fond of admitting coyly, he did not know very well.” In the “quasi-official account of her life,” Bell portrayed Woolf as sexually frigid, emotionally fragile, and often mad. Forrester, however, reads wild sensuality in her work, and she blames Leonard for quashing her desires. As Forrester sees him, Leonard was obsessive and neurotic, projecting onto his wife “what worried him about himself.” He insisted that she was an invalid needing rest and isolation; he forced upon her a daily glass of milk, which Virginia despised. He also took her to many doctors, eliciting their opinions about whether she should have a child. There was no consensus, but he and Vanessa decided it would be better if she did not. Forrester convincingly argues that calling Woolf “mad” is “a dangerous simplification”; instead, the author sees her anguish and rage precipitated by “clearly definable causes” such as “the despotic brutality with which she has…been denied children.”
An engrossing, intimate, and deeply empathetic portrayal of a brilliant and enigmatic woman. The book won the 2009 Prix Goncourt in France.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-15356-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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