A sad history of a woman consumed by passion and despair.
Steamy sex in 1920s Paris.
When Berthault, the former French ambassador to Brunei, found a cache of love letters in a friend’s cellar, he became so fascinated that he bought them. This selection, lightly annotated, represents about a third of the “salacious” correspondence, written from 1928 to 1930, of Simone to her married lover, Charles, “something to be read,” Berthault suggests, “with the avid curiosity that an anachronistic pornographic novel might arouse.” Pornographic they are, and tediously repetitive as well, as Simone recounts the thrusting, licking, throbbing, and quivering of their lovemaking and tantalizes Charles with “the perverse ministrations” that she will offer at their next tryst. In the first months of the affair, they engage in oral and anal sex, and she delights in his beating her until she is raw and bleeding. “Do you know, you have so thoroughly whipped these buttocks you love,” she exults, that they are “one huge bruise.” She promises that one day, he will tie her wrists and ankles to the bedposts “and whip me furiously,” a prospect she thinks he ardently desires. Anticipating his desires becomes her way of proving her all-consuming love. “Did I not tell you I was your slave?” she asks. Hardly a sexually liberated woman, Simone reveals herself to be needy, neurotic, and hysterical, desperately afraid that Charles will leave her. “She would have made an ideal patient for Dr. Freud,” the editor comments. About six months into the affair, Simone decides that Charles secretly longs for a homosexual relationship, given his “taste for sodomy.” Charles, she says, will become her “mistress” and Simone the “man.” She even offers him a male lover, who, Berthault speculates, may have hastened the end of the affair. After two years, Charles was weary of his wild mistress.
A sad history of a woman consumed by passion and despair.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9877-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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