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IN THE LAND OF PAIN

Name: IN THE LAND OF PAIN
Author: Alphonse Daudet
ISBN: 0-375-41485-1

by Alphonse Daudet & translated by Julian Barnes & edited by Julian Barnes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2003

Harrowing and altogether memorable.

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For devoted readers of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Baudelaire’s fevered journals, a 19th-century account of slow death by syphilis.

“Spasms in the right foot, with pains shooting all the way up my sides. I feel like a one-man band, tugging on all his strings and playing all his instruments at once.” Thus Daudet (1840–97), giving little evidence to support Henry James’s wistful remark that the French author (and renowned anti-Semite) was “the happiest novelist of his day.” Daudet contracted syphilis at the age of 17—he liked to point out that its source was a lady of the court, not some streetwalker—and discovered in his mid-40s that the disease had transformed into tabes dorsalis, an exceedingly agonizing variety that moved many of its sufferers to suicide. The always-observant writer took the occasion to record his lingering demise, making notes that were later published as La Doulou (the Provençal version of the French douleur, “pain”). In his thoughtful introduction (which gets in a few digs at another recorder of his own death, Harold Brodkey), British novelist Barnes describes his encounter with Daudet’s journals while researching his 1982 novel Flaubert’s Parrot; though he reckons the Frenchman to be not unjustly forgotten today, he makes a good case for the intrinsic interest of Daudet’s detailed account of an illness that has since been all but eradicated. That account—full of remarks like, “My arse-hole, instead of wanting to expel things, seems to want to suck them up. It’s like an octopus. When I have an enema, I’m afraid it’s going to swallow up the pump”—is not for the tender of sensibility, though it speaks well to Graham Greene’s remark that a writer has to have a chip of ice in the heart in order to record the world truly.

Harrowing and altogether memorable.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-41485-1

Page Count: 112

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.