Uneven, hauntingly revealing and gorgeously sad, these entries reveal a wife's desperate love and estrangement from her...
A lively reworked translation of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries, first published in Russia in 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1985.
Sixteen years younger than the already famous Russian novelist, as well as self-consciously less educated and worldly, Sofia Behrs was 18 when they married in 1862. For most of the next five decades the couple lived at his ancestral 4,000-acre estate at Yasnaya Polyana, a perennial bane to upkeep, especially as Sofia was absorbed in the care and education of their 13 children (several died of illnesses) while her husband was engrossed in his writing and fame. In this diary she kept from 1862 until her death in 1919 (her husband died in 1910), Sofia indicated early on troubling fissures between the two that grew wider and more perilous as the years passed. There was a large rift between Tolstoy's idealized version of family life and what Sofia learned was truly the case—his emotional coldness (which he made up in sexual ardor), disregard for the care of the children and belittling of her role in his greatness. “There are times in this useless life of mine,” she wrote in 1890, “when I am overwhelmed with despair and long to kill myself, run away, fall in love with someone else—anything not to have to live with this man who for some reason I have always loved.” Despite the domestic drudgery, she insisted on copying out his corrected pages, which kept her involved in his life and immersed in his artistry. “Nothing touches me so deeply as his ideas, his genius,” she wrote in late 1866, when she was copying War and Peace. However, the bitterness continued to seep in, as well as a yearning for “some personal happiness, a private life and work of my own”—and, above all, the desire to feel needed and have her love returned.
Uneven, hauntingly revealing and gorgeously sad, these entries reveal a wife's desperate love and estrangement from her brilliant but complex and troubled husband.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-199741-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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