An exquisite but bittersweet madeleine of a memoir, sublime in the tasting but ultimately unsatisfying.
The legendary Deneuve, between takes.
The French icon’s film diaries project the very qualities that made their author an international figure of fascination: They are elegant, suffused with sensual beauty and intriguingly remote. The actress proves an impressive writer, waxing lyrically on her time in Vietnam filming the acclaimed Indochine, describing the exotic landscapes, energetic people and the oppressive heat with the observational acumen of a born novelist. Deneuve is surprisingly engaged in the technical process of filmmaking, keenly aware of the myriad variables that contribute to the success or failure of a scene, and she is not shy about making suggestions to her directors. She is particularly good on the subject of directors: very sympathetic to Roman Polanski, admiring of Régis Wargnier and riveting on the idiosyncrasies of surrealist director Luis Buñuel (whose Belle de Jour made Deneuve a world-wide star), her observations affectionate and full of fascinating insights into his work habits. The consistency of Deneuve’s tone is remarkable; the earliest diaries included date from the production of the 1968 romantic comedy The April Fools, and the 25-year-old Deneuve’s perspicacity is in full flower. But while she is amusingly critical (she reveals a low opinion of America) and tetchy (she hates air conditioning and frequently complains of sleepiness and sore throats), there is something fundamentally reserved about Deneuve that chafes a bit: This ravishing, talented woman bore the children of Marcello Mastroianni and Roger Vadim, was a critical part of more than a few shocking, boundary-bursting films, and she survived Lars von Trier and Björk—but the emotional tone of her record remains cool and measured, excluding the passionate messiness that must have marked such a life. Whether this indicates dignity or an ungenerous reticence is the reader’s call. Also disappointing is the relatively small pool of films reflected in the collection—her recollections of the filming of such classics as Belle de Jour, Repulsion and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are sorely missed.
An exquisite but bittersweet madeleine of a memoir, sublime in the tasting but ultimately unsatisfying.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933648-36-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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