bookshelf

LITTLE DANCER AGED FOURTEEN

Name: LITTLE DANCER AGED FOURTEEN
Author: Camille Laurens
ISBN: 978-1-59051-958-5

THE TRUE STORY BEHIND DEGAS'S MASTERPIECE

by Camille Laurens ; translated by Willard Wood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 20, 2018

A tale of artistic endeavor with more agony than ecstasy—an insightful but uneven long-form scholarly essay.

bookshelf

French novelist and essayist Laurens (Who You Think I Am, 2017, etc.) considers the history and meanings surrounding Edgar Degas’ famous sculpture and the young woman who posed for it.

Young dancers gazing wistfully at Little Dancer Aged Fourteen will be sobered by this biography of the young woman, Marie van Goethem, who posed for its creator. In the book’s effective opening third, Laurens vividly sketches out a history of the abuses of child labor in Paris in the 1880s. At 14, Marie was not so much an aspiring and inspired dancer at the Paris Opera as someone forced to play walk-on roles to help support an impoverished family. At the barre, she joined other illiterate young girls, known as “little rats.” To supplement their meager pay, the teenage girls were encouraged to work the opera house’s foyer and its backstage areas, performing sexual favors for patrons. The girls’ mothers, Marie’s probably included, encouraged the assignations. No wonder, then, that Marie willingly endured physically painful postures for sculptor and painter Degas: The assignment paid better wages and freed the young woman from the advances of old men (Degas was largely indifferent to any sort of relationship). No wonder, too, that one critic described Degas’ rendering of Marie’s face as “sickly, grayish…old and drawn before its time.” Laurens brings her commentary up to date in a telling comparison of Degas’ work to images of Marilyn Monroe. In 1956, Monroe donned a tutu and posed next to the statue. The photos suggest, the author writes, “a ballerina overcome by loneliness, a soul sister ‘Little Sister.’" The narrative’s final third fails to cap the work, trailing off into unanswerable questions about Marie’s fate as a woman; the faint clues Laurens found about Marie’s adult life led nowhere. A somewhat opaque personal commentary describing the author’s deep feelings for the statue and its subject ends the work on a note of melancholy.

A tale of artistic endeavor with more agony than ecstasy—an insightful but uneven long-form scholarly essay.

Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-59051-958-5

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
IN HIS ARMS
by Camille Laurens & translated by Ian Monk

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.