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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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