A tale of artistic endeavor with more agony than ecstasy—an insightful but uneven long-form scholarly essay.
French novelist and essayist Laurens (Who You Think I Am, 2017, etc.) considers the history and meanings surrounding Edgar Degas’ famous sculpture and the young woman who posed for it.
Young dancers gazing wistfully at Little Dancer Aged Fourteen will be sobered by this biography of the young woman, Marie van Goethem, who posed for its creator. In the book’s effective opening third, Laurens vividly sketches out a history of the abuses of child labor in Paris in the 1880s. At 14, Marie was not so much an aspiring and inspired dancer at the Paris Opera as someone forced to play walk-on roles to help support an impoverished family. At the barre, she joined other illiterate young girls, known as “little rats.” To supplement their meager pay, the teenage girls were encouraged to work the opera house’s foyer and its backstage areas, performing sexual favors for patrons. The girls’ mothers, Marie’s probably included, encouraged the assignations. No wonder, then, that Marie willingly endured physically painful postures for sculptor and painter Degas: The assignment paid better wages and freed the young woman from the advances of old men (Degas was largely indifferent to any sort of relationship). No wonder, too, that one critic described Degas’ rendering of Marie’s face as “sickly, grayish…old and drawn before its time.” Laurens brings her commentary up to date in a telling comparison of Degas’ work to images of Marilyn Monroe. In 1956, Monroe donned a tutu and posed next to the statue. The photos suggest, the author writes, “a ballerina overcome by loneliness, a soul sister ‘Little Sister.’" The narrative’s final third fails to cap the work, trailing off into unanswerable questions about Marie’s fate as a woman; the faint clues Laurens found about Marie’s adult life led nowhere. A somewhat opaque personal commentary describing the author’s deep feelings for the statue and its subject ends the work on a note of melancholy.
A tale of artistic endeavor with more agony than ecstasy—an insightful but uneven long-form scholarly essay.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-958-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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