Limp, literary porn for the soft-core set.
Three steamy years in the life of an insatiable, pleasure-seeking Parisian Lolita.
Racking up at least four random sexual encounters on an average day, Tasso aims to achieve her “personal marathon” of 10,000 sexual conquests, scrupulously scribbled in diary entries that make up this “international bestseller”—all with her dear grandmother’s blessing. Ravaging men like a lioness and then hastily retreating, the author sleeps her way through tour guides, obese “pachyderm”-like men, cops and scores of others. Her best friend, Sonia, offers comic relief during Tasso’s downtime, but soon, the promiscuous author is sexing her way across Europe again, thanks to the travel perks afforded by her cushy advertising job. The dark, dangerous hills of Lima, Peru, France, Barcelona—all provide a fertile environment for the ravenous Tasso to carry on the countless, spontaneous erotic encounters that she never seems to regret. Her only “golden rule” is to remain detached from these anonymous trysts, to be enjoyed on a one-time-only basis: “A repeat session with a stranger doesn’t interest me. I prefer to pick up someone else in the street.” Ultimately, real life intervenes, stagnating much of the second half of Tasso’s formerly vigorous adventures. She gets laid off (from work, that is), her beloved grandmother dies and she has an abortion, all of which serve as sobering reality checks. Working as a freelance translator barely keeps the author afloat, though an attempt to score more permanent employment leads only to an extended melodramatic affair with Jaime, the cash-strapped compulsive liar who’d first interviewed her. Turning 30, desperate times force her to become a prostitute at a brothel, a job that provides easy money, though the demeaning, aggressive customers and a malicious “boss” eventually take their toll. And then love rescues the happy hooker. Amazingly, the worst physical malady Tasso contracts is gastroenteritis. Though written in deceptively dulcet tones, Tasso is a drama queen, and her initially titillating thrills are deflated by her many halfhearted theatrics.
Limp, literary porn for the soft-core set.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56975-560-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amorata/Ulysses
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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