Pretty prose and a pleasing subject for lovers of literary gossip, but Roiphe doesn’t come up with any real revelations...
Tidily composed, broadly researched examination of seven unconventional early modern marriages.
Cultural critic and novelist Roiphe (Still She Haunts Me, 2001, etc.) is drawn to artists who flourished between the two world wars because they were torn between Victorian and modernist sensibilities, their unions subject to conflicts and contradictions not unfamiliar to couples in our own era. Acknowledging her subject’s “natural prurience” only to brush aside doubts (“Why should it be prurient? Marriage is perpetually interesting.”), she delves eagerly into the intimate lives and letters of those in marital conflict and revels in their posturing. Inveterate womanizer H.G. Wells, for example, idolized his stay-at-home wife Jane even while carrying on with Rebecca West and asserting in his work the value of free love. Ailing, ethereal short-story author Katherine Mansfield and critic John Middleton Murry enjoyed a curiously chaste, childlike marriage; they lived largely apart, so their relationship remained abstract and purely romantic. By sheer force of her generous personality, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa was able to maintain her marriage to Clive Bell, nurture three children and keep several lovers around her at the same time. Aristocratic hostess Ottoline Morrell was shaken by the revelation of her husband Philip’s infidelity, even though her own numerous affairs included a long-term entanglement with Bertrand Russell. Novelist Radclyffe Hall had been faithful to Una Troubridge for 18 years when she became besotted with a Russian nurse and persuaded them both to join her in a tense “trio lesbienne” that endured for more than a decade. Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby weren’t lovers, but Brittain found more happiness living with her girlhood friend than with husband George Gordon Catlin. Memoirist and novelist Elizabeth Von Arnim, today less well known than the others, also favored rule-breaking alliances.
Pretty prose and a pleasing subject for lovers of literary gossip, but Roiphe doesn’t come up with any real revelations about some very familiar figures.Pub Date: July 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-33937-7
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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