From French author and producer DelbÇe, a fictionalized biography of current French feminist martyr Claudel, whose ill- starred life has also been the subject of a 1989 movie (Camille Claudel), as well as a play by DelbÇe. Reflecting its theatrical origins, the novel proceeds in a series of set pieces to tell the life of a talented woman doomed by a famous brother and even more famous lover. Born in 1864 to an ill-assorted couple, with a mother, provincial in habit and outlook, doing all she could to crush her daughter's spirit, Camille was determined from childhood to be a sculptor. Encouraged by her father, she took lessons and, when the family moved to Paris, was apprenticed to the much older Auguste Rodin, who—though immediately recognizing her tremendous talent—was equally ready to use it for his own ends, getting her to work on such pieces as the famed Burghers of Calais and Gates of Hell. Meanwhile, her younger brother, Paul, went on to become a famous poet. Camille soon became Rodin's lover, exhibited some of her own pieces, but found herself the subject of gossip and unkind speculation—her powerful and original work was thought to be really Rodin's. Rodin himself, unable to leave his loyal mistress, the aging Rose, was congenitally unfaithful, as well as overly demanding of Camille's assistance in his studio. He also seems to have stolen Camille's ideas, using one of her most cherished concepts for his famous statue of Balzac. Poor, unable to afford expensive sculpting supplies, and neglected by her increasingly famous brother, Camille began in 1906 a downward spiral into a madness that could confine her for 30 years to an asylum, where she died in 1943. A sorry tale of a wasted talent and life that deserves something better than this melodramatic, impressionistic account— an account long on effects and short on insight. (Includes 16 pp. of original photographs of Claudel's work and life.)
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1992
ISBN: 1-56279-026-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
