A palpable, engrossing portrait of three extraordinary women and their tempestuous, fragile world.
A captivating triple biography reveals the women who inspired Marcel Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes.
In his seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, Proust drew on his astute observations of Parisian high society: the dazzling glamour, effete customs, and, as he increasingly noted, superficiality and banality. Focusing on three alluring women who were objects of Proust’s fascination, Weber (French and Comparative Literature/Barnard Coll.; Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, 2006, etc.) portrays in rich detail a French aristocracy threatened by profound social and political change. Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus (widow of the composer Georges Bizet); Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné (a descendent of the Marquis de Sade); and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Vicomtesse Greffulhe were the grandes dames who fueled Proust’s “dream of patrician elegance and grace.” Each assiduously developed “a conscious strategy of self-promotion,” honing a distinctive image to achieve recognition and admiration. Élisabeth traded on her beauty, wearing only clothing “designed by her and for her.” Laure, with a particular talent for self-aggrandizement and tireless indulgence for “wild nights” at the notorious Chat-Noir, made sure to publicize her Sadean lineage. Geneviève, who entertained wearing “silky, mauve peignoirs,” had a reputation as “the neurasthenic queen of Montmartre.” Each was married, unhappily, and strived for some measure of independence at a time when women “had the legal status of minors.” As Élisabeth wrote, “women are meant to be trophies, pretty possessions….Smiling, placid, charming. Not leaving the nest, staying in the aviary.” Weber offers intimate details of their love affairs, betrayals, friendships, and rivalries; their worries over money and status; and their “grappl[ing] with mental illness and drug addiction.” She recounts vividly the plush ambience, dress, and décor of their châteaux and palaces as well as the parties and salons peopled by royalty, artists, and writers who mesmerized the young, aspiring, impressionable Proust.
A palpable, engrossing portrait of three extraordinary women and their tempestuous, fragile world.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-307-96178-5
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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